Comprehensive Flexibility Is Key To Successfully Managing Today’s Mixed Communications Environment After years of analysis and investment, many in the business and services community are realizing that the time, money, and effort spent moving their existing voice/data services to VoIP did not deliver the benefits originally anticipated by their call centers, Telecom, and IT departments. Problems such as inconsistent reliability, poor voice quality, and higher-than-expected support costs have demonstrated that the reality with VoIP has been quite different from the original expectation. Still, despite these setbacks, enterprises have accepted that this migration is a certain eventuality for their entire business communications environment. Unfortunately, managing a mixed voice/data environment that comprises legacy TDM, IP voice, and IT data assets have resulted in a hodgepodge of vendors’ solutions and proprietary tools that require extensive personnel, processes, and knowledge. This technology mix has added significantly higher cost and complexity to the task of converged communications management.
Many organizations are ill equipped to effectively provide the specialized expertise that is required to support a converged voice and data communications infrastructure.
In many organizations, communications support duties are being combined across voice, data, and networks, leaving administrators and support staff ill-equipped to effectively provide the specialized expertise and in-depth support that are required for a converged voice and data infrastructure. Further, utilization of multiple, vendorspecific support tools creates silos of management with low visibility and control between critical voice and data assets — putting the overall quality and service levels of the converged environment at high-risk. Despite these challenges, enterprises can envision the benefits derived from bringing these diverse technologies together to form a cohesive, easy-to-manage business communications platform. They understand a stable, flexible communications platform is essential to successfully launch additional strategic business objectives such as unified communications, workforce mobility, and online collaboration. Once achieved, a unified platform represents a strategic advantage that can translate into lower operating costs, more satisfied customers, and a position of market leadership that can in turn generate greater business opportunities. Failure is not an option. As businesses accept the inevitability of moving to VoIP, they must also ensure
consistent 24/7-service delivery as well as reliable voice quality in order to avoid negatively impacting customer service, brand loyalty, and future business opportunities and initiatives. As a result, both enterprises and service providers need a highly flexible solution that will evolve and manage both current and future mixtures of communications technology from end to end if they are to achieve their strategic business objectives. The goal of this white paper is to demonstrate to enterprise businesses and service providers how the implementation of a highly flexible communication management solution is pivotal to building the strong, “bulletproof” platform necessary to achieve business critical, strategic communications objectives.
Five Challenges in Managing a Diverse Converging Communications Environment When one analyzes the many challenges associated with managing today’s complex converged voice/data communications environment, there are five issues that rise to the top of the list.
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