in the future. This magnifies the necessity for a robust, flexible management platform that is capable of expanding and adapting to support current and future technologies — regardless of manufacturer choice. 4. Misunderstanding the Cost/Strategy Relationship. For service providers, managing costs is essential for success. Any provider must understand this relationship and how the implementation of specific management solutions impacts the operational overhead of their network operating centers (NOCs). Implementing an expensive solution that limits the scope of their future service offerings will not provide a cost or revenue advantage, and will have a severe impact on the overall profitability of that provider. For large businesses, measuring the ROI of convergence has historically centered on monetary cost savings. But the measure of true ROI goes well beyond such costs, and must also include the measure of how well the solution supports existing and future enterprise business strategies. If newly implemented converged communications solutions result in poor voice quality, greater network latency, or diminished customer service, any monetary cost savings would be minor as compared to the lost revenue opportunities associated with unhappy customers, and the decreased productivity from disenfranchised employees. Without comprehensive, flexible management of the evolving converged environment, businesses seriously jeopardize their probability of achieving their desired ROI, while increasing the risk that they’ll fail to successfully deliver on their converged communications promises.
If newly implemented communications solutions result in poor voice quality, any monetary cost savings would be minor as compared to lost revenue opportunities and decreased productivity.
5. Lack of an Extensive Knowledge Base. With today’s mixed vendor communications infrastructure, enterprises can no longer rely on their existing technical support personnel to have the extensive knowledge base necessary to support their mixture of data and voice technologies. To successfully diagnose, resolve, and prevent communications quality and reliability issues, administrators must be able to access and utilize both manufacturer-specific component details, as well as enterprise-specific operational data relevant to current enterprise conditions. Likewise, procedures previously employed to diagnose and resolve issues should be documented, readily available, and easily accessible to assist all support team members in performing their core responsibilities, and to ensure the most rapid response and resolution to communications issues. To overcome these deficiencies, enterprises must deploy highly effective solutions that assist administrators in understanding the hybrid voice and data environment and enhance their ability to maintain converged voice service levels.
ReliaTelTM: Holistic End-to-End Control over an Entire Mixed Communications Environment The reality with today’s highly complex and competitive business environment is that the enterprise communications infrastructure must now do more than merely provide basic data and voice services. The new building blocks for success require highly responsive enterprises to use these infrastructures to initiate cutting-edge solutions to unify business communications, deploy workforce mobility, and improve workforce collaboration. The new requirements for administrative responsiveness require providing support personnel with a high degree of control over the entire voice and data environment that moves them from tactics such as “reactive fire fighting” to strategies that employ “proactive trending and analysis” to avert signs of possible communications network risks and outages. Leveraging tools that enable the collection of real-time data, key performance trends, and service level metrics that reveal impending quality degradation and potential service interruptions is essential to this strategy. A unified solution that provides this form of end-to-end operational control, detailed information analysis, rapid response support, and bottom-line cost effectiveness is the vision behind the ReliaTel Monitoring and Management Solution (see Figure 1). 5