The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.
UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.
This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.
This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.
The Unified Communications industry changes daily. We keep track of it for you.
UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.
A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.
Over the years, networks have evolved to become more sophisticated yet complicated. IP networks, utilizing VoIP and SIP trunking technologies, can simultaneously handle voice, data and video traffic as well as a myriad of business and contact center technologies. This convergence offers an opportunity to increase revenue, lower costs, boost productivity and enhance customer service. However, it has also significantly increased IT challenges. The network is now a shared resource forced to support multiple mission critical services. Guaranteeing service quality and protecting the network from malicious attacks are primary concerns. As a result, more elements are added to the mix, such as sophisticated, application-aware firewalls and session border controllers (SBCs), that boost security and control traffic. In this way, IT departments strive to allow the maximum volume of users to remain connected, and optimally served, by the network.
Now, every upgrade or new service deployment is more complex. Each change made in this end-to-end communications network can affect other elements and jeopardize the quality of service for real-time voice and video communications. However, organizations cannot afford to ignore new technologies and the opportunities they provide. They need to be able to deploy new solutions, on time and on budget, with full confidence that they will work as designed.
Successful organizations do not sit back and simply wait for something to go wrong. When quality issues arise in a live environment, companies run the risk of business process inefficiencies, lost revenue, frustrated users, damaged reputations, and time-consuming remediation. For business processes to function smoothly, communications and network staff must assure a great experience for all users — be they customers, remote employees, internal employees, partners, or even automated systems. Companies that successfully and continuously leverage the latest IP technologies are those committed to best practice test methods for all projects and proactively monitoring to detect issues before they effect users.
This whitepaper will present the best-practice processes, test methods and quality metrics organizations can use to more easily transition to new IP technologies and enhance their business processes.