UC Network Management Featured Article

Performance Management Solutions for UC Network Management

While the benefits of unified communications (UC) are widely proven, most enterprises today struggle to successfully deploy and deliver advanced UC tools like Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, or Avaya’s Aura platform. This, in turn, has led to underutilization and an inability to manage UC. At the same time, the average mid-size to large enterprise is more complex than ever before. Research has found that 75 percent of these enterprises use two or more different PBX vendors, and 33 percent have active users on two or more UC solutions (presence and IM at minimum).

Luckily, there are tools to help.

What Are Performance Management Solutions?

Performance management solutions are one set of tools that is rapidly evolving to help IT workers better deploy, manage, and expand UC in their companies. They’re powerful tools designed to better manage complex, multi-vendor environments, across complex networks, and extending from the app to the device connected to the end user.

In a UC Performance Management e-book entitled, “Accelerating UC Deployment and Adoption,” Nectar, in partnership with Wainhouse Research, writes that many IT workers need help using performance management solutions to enhance their UC experience. Under-deployment is costing companies a great deal: research by Wainhouse estimates that 40 percent of all UC licenses are undeployed.

“Most support teams are faced with an exploding universe of tools to figure out what’s going on in the average UC world,” according to the e-book’s authors.

UC performance management solutions are third-party tool sets that bring multiple IT monitoring and management tools into a single platform. Many IT teams are quite familiar with these types of tools, but many have an outdated perspective on what they can do. That’s primarily because these solutions have roots in traditional network-focused monitoring and alerting solutions.

A Wider Functionality Footprint

Today’s performance management solutions provide a much wider functionality footprint. While the network is arguably the most important pillar supporting the UC user experience, IT teams responsible for UC also need insight into the application and endpoint health as well. UC performance management solutions provide a consolidated view of application, network and endpoint health to accurately ferret out weak spots and determine a course of action to fix them.

UC Performance At-a-Glance

It helps when IT teams can see the health of the company’s UC system at-a-glance. A good set of UC performance management tools will feature a dashboard that consolidates metrics across three core areas of functionality – monitoring, diagnostics and reporting -- providing IT with technical insight before, during, and after a potential issue arises.

To read more about the key benefits these UC performance management solutions deliver to the support team and the enterprise they support, download the e-book.

Edited by Maurice Nagle