We're hosting a Webinar April 9 on the topic of automated provisioning (go here to register), and Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting and UCStrategies.com (and, of course, VoiceCon and this blog site too) is going to be our featured analyst. Marty's very psyched to do the event, which I think will open up another aspect of the Unified Communications conversation.
I was a little surprised by Marty's enthusiasm, only because so much of UniComm's and UCStrategies' focus has been on the "hot" areas of UC, primarily things like communications-enabled business practices and unifying collaborative communications apps. Network management/administration is rarely the "hot" area of anything; it's the classic underappreciated function in networking.
In particular, Marty has spent a great deal of time developing sample RFPs for Unified Communications, and in talking to him about provisioning, he sees a real fit there. He noted that if a customer wants to migrate from either traditional TDM or, more likely, a mixed TDM-IP environment, to one that supports UC, that customer is looking at a complex mix of probably 3-4 telephony platforms, plus is trying to figure out if, and how, to add Microsoft Office Communications Server or IBM Lotus Sametime to the mix as the UC engine. In short, it's an environment that cries out for some kind of management and administration systems that can mask, if not eliminate, the underlying complexity.
Being able to automate and manage provisioning in a more coherent way would certainly speed the payback on such a migration, as well as making it more cost-effective to deploy more widely. The question I think we'll have to grapple with in the webinar is: How does the IT department secure upper management buy-in for this type of investment? Network management traditionally is an area in which enterprises under-invest, and typically invest as little as possible until it becomes a true pain point. I'm interested to hear what Marty and Theresa Dixon of Unimax have to say about not just making the technology work, but making the case for the technology.
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