Digital transformation applies the cloud and other technologies to key business processes, delivering a fast, convenient, and personalized user experience. As you might expect, unified communications (UC) vendors are uniquely positioned to drive digital transformation from a platform that integrates voice, video, collaboration, and contact center.
How will organizations apply digital transformation to their business communications? Well, moving to the cloud is a key first step, allowing businesses to scale up and layer on new technologies more easily. We know that omnichannel communications is becoming important, as consumers increasingly expect to move seamlessly between smartphones, tablets, and laptops and be served via chat, voice, or video. The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect everything in our lives to the Internet, making it possible for devices to communicate with other devices, and for people to communicate with other people, all over a UC network.
Network performance management is the foundation that ensures businesses can drive full speed ahead with their digital transformation initiatives. That's because the investment in digital transformation will be compromised if technologies designed to improve business communications and collaboration are not available or perform badly.
Network performance management actively monitors every corner of the network and alerts IT to anomalies and problems. For the CIO, this delivers validation of ROI for digital transformation initiatives, while giving frontline IT personnel valuable insight into performance analytics. This can prevent the types of performance problems that can come with rapid growth, while simplifying capacity planning and site qualification. An actively managed network is a healthy network, capable of absorbing additional stress without a decline in performance.
The transition from traditional premises-based UC to a cloud-hosted business communications solution provides an excellent example of this. Growth in cloud-hosted UC is driven by its lower-cost opex model, and the flexible, scalable platform it delivers for digital transformation. However, while cloud-hosted networks create simplicity for users, they bring complexity to the IT organizations tasked with managing them. We work with channel partners that have eased the pain of this transition with active network performance management.
Tel-e-Connect Systems, known as TCS Canada, is one such partner. The Toronto-based Mitel partner has a track record of growth over 35 years in business, and today services more than 10,000 customers across Canada. Owner Mike Tavares explained that the company began to offer a cloud-hosted UC service to meet customer demand, and today has a "double duty" business model with both hosted and premises-based sides of the house. It's an increasingly common setup as the industry shifts to the cloud, and Mitel is an ideal vendor with solutions that are flexible enough to meet customers wherever they are on their journey -- with premises, cloud, and hybrid options.
For channel partners like TCS, staying on top of performance problems with two distinct UC network offerings can be challenging. Compounding this challenge, Mike said, is that customers are more tech-savvy than ever before, and expect their service providers to resolve network and voice quality problems quickly. TCS implemented network performance management software that not only watches over both sides of his business, but gives TCS deep insight into Mitel-specific metrics like voice quality and SIP trunk utilization. This has made customers stickier, since they can deal with problems more proactively.
Like a house, the technology deployed on a UC network is only as strong as the foundation you've built with a well-managed infrastructure. Click here to discover more on the steps to take.
