The current economic climate has pushed enterprises to look at how the complex web of business communications can be simplified to enhance productivity and reduce costs. Unified communications and collaborations (UC&C) offers the potential to deliver efficiencies that improve bottom-line growth by eliminating boundaries between fixed-line phones, mobile devices and messaging systems.
UC involves the integration of an enterprise’s multiple and disparate communications modes into a unified and cohesive communications experience.
Data from Infonetics Research show that the overall Asia-Pacific business VoIP market is expected to grow by 12.6% through 2014, with the greatest revenue growth coming from hosted VoIP/UC at 10.4%.
This can offer revenue opportunities for service providers by building and incorporating UC offerings into their portfolios, especially on a hosted platform. But regardless of the manner of deployment and the technology used, effective ongoing service management is key to achieving the business objectives of UC.
One of the most important issues providers and enterprises face is keeping the quality of end-user experience high, and maintaining each customer’s expected service levels. Since UC involves many real-time applications, a service performance issue may not merely slow these applications but it can make them unusable. An IP telephony call with poor quality or an inferior web/video conferencing experience will be met with little tolerance by users relying on these for critical business interactions.
Providers must have the means to monitor the quality of the user experience to meet their customers' service-level expectations. Failure to do so can mean lost revenue due to customer churn or penalties for providers of managed and hosted service (MSPs and HSPs), and -- for enterprise IT staff -- the risk that UC services management will be outsourced.