Without a widespread and detailed view of UCaaS spend, enterprises could potentially be pouring their budget into a bottomless money pit. Controlling UCaaS spending requires a comprehensive and unified approach to avoid overspending in areas where it’s not necessary, and underspending where it’s needed most.
Let’s first look at some of the challenges involved with balancing your UCaaS budget, and making sure your Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solutions can handle today’s UC complexities.
One size doesn’t fit all
While every UCaaS platform, whether it’s Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Fuze, or RingCentral may offer similar features, they do differ significantly. Pricing structures, contracts, services and packages vary, which can make it difficult to compare between different UCaaS providers. One business’s needs will not necessarily be the same as another, and without proper data and analytics, the risk of overspending is high.
A melting pot of APIs
Every UCaaS platform has hundreds of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). And many enterprises use several different UCaaS platforms for various use cases. This makes managing and governance of expenses and onboarding/offboarding a complex and nightmarish task.
The nature of change
Since the onset of the pandemic, and the changes in workplace structure, there has been a massive increase in the number of UCaaS applications being used by organizations worldwide. With vendors continually adding features and services, the UC marketplace is becoming more complicated, as is the control and management of UCaaS spending.
SaaS is the way forward
The need for agility is emerging at the top of business priorities as the key driver to bring about change and growth, and SaaS tools and platforms are quickly replacing the usual ROI models. To punctuate this, 2020 was a record year for SaaS providers. SaaS has come to represent the fastest growth in cloud spending in the Asia Pacific region. APAC is already home to some of the world’s largest digital platforms – and now, enterprises are investing in cloud and other key technologies to achieve phenomenal digital transformation.
Critical Intelligence Observability: Just capturing data is no longer enough
An organization’s success hinges on delivering high quality digital experiences to customers and end users. But the applications and services that make these experiences possible are built on multi-cloud environments, and present complexity on a massive scale.
For a holistic view of UCaaS spend, it’s vital to have complete visibility into how network architecture and applications are being used, to avoid wasted dollars. CFOs and CIOs need to understand whether the deployed apps are driving the expected ROI, and this means a clear, unified view of the company’s tech stack. They need to see blind spots, know how customers are interacting with apps, and predict potential problems. This is more important then ever, with the speed at which digital transformation is happening across the world.
No-brainer solutions to get value from your UCaaS budget
After selecting the UCaaS applications most relevant to your business, it’s important to consider every single thing your chosen technology can deliver, and make sure it fulfils all business needs.
The next step is to make sure that everyone has user training, and a full understanding of all applications, so that you can optimize your ROI. If all employees understand the technology, it can help smooth out any difficulties and consistently deliver a rich user experience for every meeting. This mitigates lost time, and in the business world – time is money.
In addition, your chosen UCaaS provider should offer ongoing consultancy to ensure that users actually use the features that have been purchased. It’s also important to determine how much access to your network your service provider needs to implement and support its UCaaS solution. From this, you can consider the impact on security and compliance.
Monitoring is a vital part of the UCaaS budget
Enterprise digital transformation is perpetual, but the problem of UCaaS overspending and wastage is affecting ROIs for many enterprises. This is why monitoring, troubleshooting and performance management solutions should be an integral part of a company’s IT strategy.
Without the tools to clearly see what’s going on in what is becoming an increasingly complex environment, businesses can’t hope to deliver on their UCaaS budget expectations.
Without monitoring, CFOs and CIOs can’t factor in figures like the costs of IT staffing, the average time it takes to restore failures, the number of previous network failures, and SLAs with various service providers.
One third party monitoring tool for all UCaaS platforms
Cloud based UC applications are flexible, agile, and easy to use, which is why they have revolutionized the business world. Microsoft Teams, for example, has become one of the leading video conferencing software apps for enterprises in 2020. But every communication tool has its vulnerabilities and issues that can result in a terrible user experience, and impact an organization’s bottom line.
While all UC tools come with their own monitoring and troubleshooting software, they only have the ability to see inside their own environment. This is why implementing a third party monitoring and performance management solution like IR Collaborate makes good business sense.
Our Collaborate suite of solutions offer enterprise grade performance management across voice, video and entire collaboration ecosystems, with insight into:
- Multi-vendor monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics
- License visibility
- Meeting/webinar security management
- User troubleshooting with problem soured domain identification
- Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring and alerts
- Live and historical meeting data analysis
Including a leading-edge tool like Collaborate in your UC budget can not only simplify complex environments, and proactively increase uptime, but help to give business leaders the edge when it comes to controlling their UCaaS budgets.
