As communications networks become more tightly integrated with the overall enterprise network infrastructure, communications managers get the opportunity to automate more functions that used to suck a lot of time--rote tasks like setting up and taking down user accounts as employees joined and left the company.
Such automation systems, once implemented, offer time (and therefore money) savings, but they could still represent a major effort upfront to translate the enterprise's unique business processes and policies into the software code that runs the automation system and tells it what do.
Unimax has been one of the companies taking the lead in management automation, and I got the chance to chat with Phil Moen, their CEO, yesterday, along with Todd Remely, who's director of marketing, and Teresa Dixon, director of product management. Late last year, Unimax announced the availability of a Web Services-based API and SDK to go with the also-newly-announced release of their flagship product, 2nd Nature.
Phil Moen explained that in the past, when Unimax was implementing 2nd Nature with an enterprise customer or a channel business that was handling management for enterprises, the company would have to sit down with Unimax and map out its business processes, for which Unimax would then build the application functionality to connect with 2nd Nature. In turn, 2nd Nature connects with Avaya and Cisco IP-PBXs on one side, and the corporate directory infrastructure on the other side, to invoke the moves, adds, changes and other management functions per the rules the company has set up.
The process of translating enterprise processes into 2nd Nature functionality could be arduous: "The longest engagement we get into when we meet with a customer is documenting processes," he said. "All of what they know, is what we have to consume."
An example of how the SDK speeds things up would be in the permissions and policies implemented based on roles within the enterprise, Phil said. The enterprise might decide that the use case it needs to solve involves automating the process of changing employees' level of access to various features/functions of the communications system when those employees' roles change within the company. So now, with the SDK, the company itself can write a script that does a scheduled, comprehensive check of the directory for such role changes, and triggers 2nd Nature to make the changes to those employees' functionalities based on the rules set up within 2nd Nature. No more need for HR or telecom to put in individual tickets, manually, to accomplish this.
Writing the Web Services code for this automation script is something that enterprises are very familiar with, and the process is much more straightforward and simple than the previous method, Phil added.
As suggested above, the new SDK/middleware is aimed at 3 levels of Unimax customers:
1. Enterprises that Unimax sells directly to.
2. The third-party community, including managed services providers and telecom distributors. Phil Moen believes the SDK will help adopters in this segment as they strive continually to differentiate their service from competitors'.
3. Unimax itself: If the enterprise wants Unimax to do the customization, that process becomes simpler for Unimax, and they can get the customer up and running quicker.
One of the axioms about network management is that it's rarely implemented to its fullest from the get-go. Rather, enterprises, whatever the technology they're adopting, tend to roll out the functionality with the bare minimum of network management they can get away with. Then, as the technology deployment scales, they find management becoming a time drain and a pain point that costs them real money in the resources and time it demands. That's when they start looking to third-party systems like Unimax's, and when automation of management processes starts looking especially attractive.
We're seeing signs that this is starting to happen now. Our Enterprise Connect sessions and other content relating to management systems and network-level test tools are gaining in popularity, and customer case studies are becoming easier to find. If enterprises want to make communications simple for the end user, they'll also need to make it simpler for network managers to deal with.
