Enabling Agility – Leveraging Managed UC&C for Business Success

By Verizon Business

Although unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) is relatively new, it is already viewed as being synonymous with business agility among leading industry analysts. Transforming the workplace of tomorrow is topping many enterprises’ agendas, as Forrester research shows that this past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of firms that are evaluating/piloting unified communications solutions—a 21% increase from 36% to 57% across enterprises.

And the reasons are clear. The ability to connect to people and information in more efficient, more productive and faster ways helps improve productivity and performance-key to achieving success in a global economy. According to a 2006 study by research firm Frost & Sullivan sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft[1], collaboration is a key driver of the overall performance of companies around the world. Fostering an environment in which collaboration is second nature is an essential element for today's business to succeed in the global economy.

And it is not just the CIO who has bought into the concept of unleashing the full collaborative power of UC&C. Indeed, business executives and end-users are primary sponsors, motivated by the productivity value from the tools and applications that they rely on everyday to get their work done. 

But herein lies the challenge for your IT department-UC&C can offer tremendous benefits for your business, but traditional in-house deployments can be costly and complex. How can you ensure an acceptable and consistent quality of experience, without jeopardizing business goals?  What is the best way to plan a UC&C deployment across a broad spectrum of technologies and manage the health of the UC&C components (servers, network, devices, and so on)?  It is also important to appreciate that implementing UC&C is not just an IT challenge as the full benefits of UC&C are difficult to achieve without a corresponding change management effort that includes behavioral change.

This article examines the merits of acquiring UC&C as a managed service. With this approach, businesses realize the true benefits-letting them get on with the important business of maximizing opportunities as oppose to managing technology.

The Advantages of Implementing UC&C as a Managed Service
Clearly, businesses with the available financial and technical resources could manage an in-house implementation of UC&C. While such an approach would allow hands-on control of the solution, in the current economic environment the "build and manage it yourself" model may not be as sustainable as it once was.

A case can be made that a more efficient UC&C implementation can be achieved through a managed services model. With a dedicated focus on information and communications technology management, managed service providers possess broad experience and deep expertise that is not easily matched by their clients. Through accumulated best-practice knowledge, managed service providers are ideally positioned to combine the compelling benefits of UC&C with the ability to control costs, reduce business risk, and protect against technology obsolescence.

Based on these considerations, it's no surprise that many organizations are modifying their UC&C strategies to include managed service provider engagement. In fact, Forrester Research has found that 71% of businesses evaluating UC&C solutions are interested in acquiring UC&C in conjunction with a managed service.[2]

Let's take a closer look at how a managed service provider could help an organization better manage costs, reduce business risk, and avoid technology obsolescence in their UC&C implementation.

Control Costs
In this challenging global economic environment, companies are looking for opportunities to control costs wherever possible. Businesses can realize the full benefits of their UC&C investment with reduced capital and operational investments by leveraging the extensive technical and operational expertise, custom management tools and ongoing training programs of an established leader in lifecycle management services. Even in an ideal economic climate, maintaining in-house technical staff with a charter to remain current on rapidly changing technologies detracts management focus from strategic core-business initiatives. This issue is particularly costly for individual businesses that are unable to realize the economies of scale necessary to justify the substantial financial investment of developing and maintaining expertise in industry technologies and vendor-specific technical certifications.

Substantial investment is also required to evaluate and integrate best-in-breed management tools into a comprehensive management platform that automates critical management processes. For example, Verizon Business has invested $150 million dollars over numerous years to create and enhance its state-of-the-art, multi-vendor network management system that automates processes including discovery of network topology and services, 7x24 fault and performance monitoring, root cause analysis, trouble ticket creation and customer notification.

Reduced Business Risk
Minimizing risk is an essential part of any organization's overall business plan. A managed service provider with expertise in network management can help minimize risk not only within the scope of a particular UC&C solution, but wherever it integrates with the broader network system. This can be accomplished through a number of services, including:

• Highly automated operational processes that accelerate the time between problem detection and isolation and escalate to engineering resources only in cases where the problem cannot be automatically resolved
• Root cause analysis engine that leverages a knowledge base collected from years of operational experience and expertise available only to a major provider of managed services
• Proactive performance management that recommends remedial action in advance of visibility to users and impact to the business

Protection from Technology Obsolescence
UC&C product vendors continue to announce technology advancements at a rapid pace. Notable examples of recent vendor developments include:

• Network leader Cisco Systems will showcase features of its extensive suite of UC&C applications that leverage intelligence in the IP network at Cisco Expo Saudi in mid February 2009.
• Desktop software leader Microsoft released its Office Communications Server (OCS) release 2 in early February 2009 that continues to fill gaps in traditional PBX feature/function and enhances its unified communications capabilities.
• Software giant IBM announced in March 2008 plans to leverage its strong market position in instant messaging and presence software by investing $1B in UC over the next 3 years, adding that the company is going "full bore into UC."

In this environment of rapid technology change, businesses are well-advised to combine lifecycle management services of a world-class leader in managed UC&C services with vendor-provided software subscription to provide timely access to important UC&C capabilities at a budgetary price.

Lifecycle Management
Whether undertaken in-house or in cooperation with an external services provider, implementation and management of the UC&C infrastructure is a continuous process as opposed to a traditional project with a start and end date. As such, the most successful UC&C initiatives are those that adopt a comprehensive proactive lifecycle management approach.

The first phase of the UC&C lifecycle is business planning. In this phase, business requirements and expectations of the UC&C system are thoroughly documented. A successful UC&C rollout requires careful planning with particular focus on business processes, culture, and dynamics. While UC&C enables new and more effective ways of doing business, its initial rollout must effectively integrate new processes and tools with often long-entrenched organizational processes in order to gain user acceptance.

The planning phase is necessarily owned by business management. However, collaboration with an external business consulting organization is an excellent means of obtaining an objective perspective on workgroup preferences, usage patterns and business values.

With business requirements well-defined and thoroughly documented , this phase concludes with clear communication of business requirements to technology teams that have responsibility for implementing subsequent phases of the project. Close alignment of business management and technical operations is critical to ensure that the subsequent technical design satisfies business requirements. Where a managed services provider has been selected for UC&C management, this alignment also lays the groundwork for the long-term business partnership.

Subsequent phases of UC&C lifecycle management circle are driven by the technical operations organization in close alignment with business management. In a managed services model, the technical operations organization would be the services provider. Whether managed in-house or externally, however, close alignment between the business and operations teams must be maintained during each phase:

• Design Engineering: The objective of this phase is development of a technical design for the UC&C solution that meets the business requirements developed during the planning phase. This phase concludes with agreement between business management and technical operations that the design meets business requirements.
• Network Assessment: This phase involves evaluation of the existing IP network infrastructure that will serve as the foundation for UC&C applications. Specifically, the assessment evaluates network switches, routers and WAN links to determine the network's readiness to support UC&C applications with an acceptable quality of service, most notably those involving real-time voice and video communications. It may also involve a security assessment during which vulnerability is evaluated. Operational engineers prepare detailed recommendations where network security or bandwidth requires remediation.
• Implementation and Integration: Led by senior technical project management, this phase involves the realization of the planning, design and assessment phases. The project manager tracks a team of engineers through implementation of equipment and UC&C applications at multiple sites as well as integration with existing business applications.
• Operations: This phase consists of day-to-day operational management of the UC&C infrastructure. It comprises around the clock monitoring of all elements of the UC&C infrastructure, including UC&C applications, interfaces to existing business applications, IP network infrastructure and WAN links. Upon detection of a problem, automated processes isolate the problem to its root cause, create a trouble ticket, notify the customer contact(s), initiation automated remediation, and escalate the problem to an operations engineer in accordance with a documented escalation procedure. Extensive automation of the problem remediation process enables quick resolution of UC&C-related incidents that result in reduced downtime for business-critical UC&C applications and its associated impact to business revenue. As a proof point, the managed service provider that has invested in extensive operations automation should be confident in its ability to offer business management a world-class service-level agreement for key metrics such as application availability and time to repair.
• Change Management: This ongoing activity encompasses all tasks that result in physical or logical change to the UC&C infrastructure. Activities range from installation of critical security software patches to after-hour modifications to application configurations to weekend implementation of upgraded hardware/software and new communications circuits. Because changes are often the primary cause of system incidents, it is critical that all changes be strictly implemented in accordance with a well-documented process that includes pre-implementation evaluation of changes to eliminate unexpected results; application and coordination of changes in accordance with customer and service provider policies; and maintenance of an audit log that documents the "who, what, when, where and why" of each network change.
• Proactive Performance Improvements: This continuous activity involves analysis of UC&C and network capacity and performance thresholds and trends that results in remedial actions to improve network performance in advance of impact to users and the business.

Conclusion
Implementing communication-enabled processes can have a direct result on a firm's revenue, competitiveness and efficiency. This enables organizations to be more agile than ever before as the ability to contact or respond to anyone at any time on any device empowers a new wave of productivity. Processes that take hours can be reduced to minutes. Ultimately businesses can improve customer satisfaction and overall productivity, helping to create new business opportunities.

By implementing UC&C as a managed service, businesses can combine the compelling top-line business value with controlled costs, reduced business risk, and protection from technology obsolescence. They can get a fully customized and totally managed UC&C solution that enables them to dedicate limited financial and technical resources to mission-critical strategic initiatives of their core businesses.

With a comprehensive suite of managed and professional services, and nearly two decades of experience in managed network solutions, Verizon Business makes it easy to realize the full value of your UC&C investment. Verizon Business stands ready to partner with you to employ technology to your strategic advantage, helping you along the path to business leadership.

References:

[1] Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance, a Frost & Sullivan white paper sponsored by Verizon Business and Microsoft, June 2006.

[2] Firms Want Managed Unified Communications, Forrester Research, July 11, 2008