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By David Leech, Vice President, Cloud and Managed Services

When I talk to CIOs about the functionality of their communication and collaboration toolsets, one of the most important things that comes up time and again in our conversations is the absolute importance of delivering the kind of experience their users expect and, frankly, demand from their business collaboration tools.

Today, “work” happens in nearly every location imaginable – in the car, at home, in the coffee shop, at the dry cleaners, in the park and – for good or bad – even on vacation! And the reason we can work anytime, anyplace is because of the sophistication of the tools we use – things like presence, video and voice – all powerful business applications that put the workplace in the palm of our hands or on the screen we’re most familiar with.

As a result, it has become more critical today than ever before that our collaboration tools function at their utmost best.  Unfortunately, however, voice and video traffic are highly susceptible to network latency and delays which can mean poor quality in each of these mediums.  And poor voice and video quality, in turn, leads to a lack of use – and trust – in the rich and robust capabilities that these tools can deliver.

To solve these issues, IT professionals need a better end-to-end view of their network’s service quality and how it’s affecting the delivery of their communications tools and applications. But, traditional network monitoring methods have not provided a sustainable way to deliver uncompromised collaboration services across a variety of vendor platforms.

At Logicalis, we have put a lot of thought into this. Whether we’re consulting with clients to help them design and deploy a communication and collaboration toolkit that will work for their organization’s specific needs, or whether we’re delivering unified communication (UC) to them as a service, we need a way to accurately measure the experience their users are having with collaboration tools, identifying issues at the point in time when users are experiencing them.  And, ideally, we want to be able to take this a step further, predicting future hotspots in the network and proactively retooling our resources to ensure service quality requirements are met in each of the environments in which these resources are used.  A high-definition telepresence system, for example, will place very different demands on the network than a desktop VOIP communication system will require.

To deliver the appropriate level of service requires a solid understanding of the network’s traffic flow as well as the quality of service demands from the tools users are depending on.  And, as we began considering this, we realized that we needed a vendor-independent software solution, one that would work across multiple platforms from Cisco to Microsoft’s Skype for Business, to help us have the kind of visibility we needed to deliver a rapid and proactive response.  After conducting a series of comparison tests, Logicalis selected Prognosis for UC from Integrated Research (IR)  as a new tool we will use to support our managed service offerings in the unified communications space.

Delivering a better user experience is entirely about having the visibility you need into the end user collaboration experience and rapidly being able to diagnose – and correct – impending network issues. This is something we believe IR’s Prognosis software can help us do, and I’m excited about putting these tools into the hands of Logicalis’ managed services engineers and enabling them to provide an even more rapid and proactive service that will take our customers’ unified communication experiences to the next level and beyond.

 

Want to learn more? Watch a brief video about unified communication, then explore the business benefits of communication and collaboration on Logicalis’ web site.  See where your company falls along the communication and collaboration transformation journey, then explore five things to consider when comparing vendors’ collaboration offerings. Is a UC-as-a-Service solution right for you? This datasheet will help you examine Logicalis’ Hosted Collaboration Solution.