Pressure to optimize costs

Economic uncertainty and budget constraints are forcing enterprises to do more with less. IT departments are under pressure to optimize the costs associated with UC systems while maintaining or even improving service levels. This requires a deep understanding of how UC resources are being used and where efficiencies can be gained, without compromising on performance or security.

Improving user experience and satisfaction

As UC becomes more integral to daily operations, user experience (UX) has taken center stage. Employees expect seamless, intuitive communication tools that integrate smoothly with their workflows. However, ensuring a consistent user experience across different locations, devices, and network conditions can be challenging. Poor UX can lead to frustration, reduced productivity, and an increase in support requests, all of which strain IT resources and impact overall business performance.

How VOSS can help

VOSS offers a comprehensive suite of tools to address these challenges, with UC automation, and advanced monitoring and analytics . Here are some examples of how VOSS can help large enterprises navigate the challenges they face:

UC automation: Streamlining complexity

VOSS’s automation tools simplify the management of large, complex UC environments. Automation reduces the need for manual intervention in routine tasks such as provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of UC systems. By automating these processes and introducing zero-touch workflows, enterprises can ensure consistency across their UC platforms, minimize the risk of human error, and free up IT resources for more strategic initiatives.

For instance, when onboarding new employees or migrating users to a new platform, VOSS’ automation tools can handle these tasks quickly and efficiently, ensuring that all necessary configurations are applied uniformly. This not only speeds up the process but also ensures that all users have a consistent experience, regardless of their location or device.

Advanced analytics: Empowering data-driven decisions

VOSS provides enterprises with real-time insights into their UC environments, enabling proactive management and optimization. The ability to monitor usage patterns, identify performance bottlenecks, and track key metrics allows IT teams to make informed decisions that improve service quality and operational efficiency.

For example, VOSS can highlight areas where UC licenses are underutilized, enabling enterprises to reallocate these licenses or scale down unnecessary capacity, thereby reducing costs. Additionally, by analyzing data on call quality, network performance, and user behavior, enterprises can pinpoint issues before they escalate into major problems, ensuring a more reliable communication experience for all employees.

Cost optimization: Doing more with less

Through a combination of automation and analytics, VOSS helps enterprises optimize their UC expenditure. Automation reduces the operational costs associated with managing UC environments, while analytics provide the insights needed to make cost-effective decisions. This dual approach ensures that enterprises can maintain high service levels while keeping their UC budgets under control. For certain use cases, it also unlocks the power of UC self-healing.

VOSS also helps identify cost-saving opportunities, such as renegotiating vendor contracts based on actual usage data or consolidating services that are underutilized. By aligning UC investments with business needs, enterprises can maximize their return on investment and ensure that their communication systems remain agile and scalable.

Real-time insight: Improving user experience and satisfaction

At VOSS, we understand that user experience is critical to the success of any UC deployment. UC tools are designed to help enterprises deliver a seamless, intuitive communication experience that meets the needs of today’s diverse workforce. VOSS’s automation capabilities ensure that every user receives consistent configurations and service levels, regardless of their device or location, reducing the likelihood of frustration and support requests. VOSS also gives IT teams detailed insights into how users interact with their UC tools, allowing them to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
UC management in 2024

As large enterprises face the multifaceted challenges of managing their UC stack, the need for advanced automation, monitoring, and analytics has never been greater. VOSS provides the tools and insights that organizations need to streamline their UC operations, optimize costs, and ensure a consistent, high-quality communication experience for all employees. By leveraging VOSS’ tools, enterprises will be in a much stronger position to overcome the complexities of hybrid work, make data-driven decisions, and maintain a competitive edge in the increasingly challenging world of business.

Special speaking session by VOSS

It was an honor for VOSS to be invited to speak at Commsverse. Join us on June 26, 2024, from 2:15 PM to 3:00 PM for a session led by Seth Schumacher, Microsoft UC and Telephony Architect at VOSS Solutions.

Event details:

• Date: June 26-27, 2024
• Location: Mercedes-Benz World, UK

For more information about Commsverse, click here , to learn more about VOSS, check out our website. To book a meeting with me, please click here.

In this third and final post, we turn our attention to business analytics. Understanding how your UC and collaboration platform aligns with your business objectives, particularly in areas such as usage and adoption, is key to optimizing resources and maximizing ROI. Business analytics serves as the foundation for these critical decisions, and that’s where VOSS Insights comes in.

Do you want to gain insight into UC asset utilization, identify areas for optimization, reduce unnecessary costs, or ensure efficient resource allocation? VOSS Insights simplifies cost management by providing a single, user-friendly dashboard for discovering, analyzing, and reporting on asset utilization and spending. Whether it’s tracking licensing, devices, telephone numbers, or capacity, VOSS Insights makes it easy to monitor and optimize these critical assets across various components of your UC ecosystem.

When it comes to usage and adoption, VOSS offers deep insights into user behavior and key business metrics, empowering you to make strategic decisions. By monitoring trend metrics and visualizing usage and adoption patterns, you can evolve your UC service to better meet the needs of your users and deliver maximum value and ROI. This data-driven approach enables decisions such as resource allocation optimization, cost reduction initiatives, or service adjustments, ensuring that UC investments align with business objectives and deliver tangible results.

VOSS simplifies monitoring platform consolidation by integrating a wide range of capabilities, including UC monitoring, UC analytics, log analytics, and NetFlow data, into a single solution. By consolidating monitoring platforms, you can streamline incident management processes and gain comprehensive visibility into your UC environment, enabling proactive problem resolution and optimization of performance and cost-effectiveness.

VOSS Insights gathers valuable data from multiple vendor tools and presents it in customizable business dashboards, empowering you to analyze usage, identify costs, and optimize capacity. By leveraging cost analytics, your UC estate remains cost-effective and adaptable to evolving business needs, driving informed decision-making and maximizing ROI.

Finally, VOSS simplifies discovery and configuration management, making it easier to track changes in the UC environment and maintain cost control. With features such as scheduled reports and automated discovery, you can ensure that you have the necessary information to balance UC performance with cost-effectiveness, facilitating seamless decision-making and optimization of resources.

Tracking User Activity and Usage of a Microsoft Teams Solution

Cost Tracking – PSTN Capacity (Trunks and DIDs)

Cost – Tracking Real-Estate – Footprint vs. Occupancy

Next steps

You’ll find more details about cost analytics, here, or please get in contact here.

Where do licensing costs come from?

For many customers, the core functionality on Microsoft Teams is delivered from either an E3 or an E5 license, retailing at $23 and $38 per user per month respectively. Enterprise agreements and discounting will reduce this, but it’ll still be a significant monthly cost. Added to this are add-on applications and capability – for example the Teams Premium license, most recently Co-Pilot, and third-party applications to meet specific business needs. These range anywhere from $10 upwards (Co-Pilot retailing at $30). A subset of users will require full calling onto the public telephone network. That draws in charges from a suitable operator ($5 – $10 for Operator Connect) or from Microsoft directly ($12 for domestic calling and $24 for International). Finally, ad-hoc user offboarding or migration processes often mean that users are charged for the cloud but also retain licenses on existing telephony platforms, from the likes of Cisco and Avaya – pulling in unnecessary costs of $5 – $15 per user.

At the extreme, that full license stack totals $104 per user per month. What’s more, tracking license allocation against the various user personas and requirements, across the various components in the system, is an arduous task that isn’t well supported by the native vendor tools. License costs grow and become a hidden cost and burden on every customer’s operating budget.

What to expect

If you budget on average for $40 per user per month on UC licensing, that covers users on simpler plans ($20) all the way through to power users on the full stack at $100. With an investment in tooling, you should be able to trim back 15% on license charges, without impacting user experience or performance. For a 10,000 user organization that’s $60,000 per month or $720,000 over the year – so significant.

• 10,000 users * $40 * 15% = $60,000 per month

Taking steps to manage licensing in a UC environment

License costs (obviously) accumulate through assignment but there are steps that can be taken to trim back.

1. The place to start is validating business and user needs vs. license plans
2. Next, monitor and manage premium licenses (E5) and license add-ons
3. Then, review calling and telephony needs
4. Identify guest users and inadvertent license assignments
5. Regularly check on in-active or previous-employee accounts
6. Finally, consolidate older telephony platforms or at least review redundant licensing

Moving to annual costs and enterprise license agreements also pull in discounts.

Does this sound simple? Unfortunately, not. It can become a daunting task alongside your organization’s day-to-day activity, the cycle of employees changing roles and onboarding and offboarding users, and the limited visibility provided by native vendor tools. Licensing each individual makes licensing hard to track, licensing by groups makes this simpler and more transparent, but there’s a case for investing in tooling to track, optimize and streamline license costs.

Investing in tools to reduce costs

This might sound contradictory, but it’s not! Tool sets provide better visibility into licensing costs, tracking usage across several components with a goal of aligning licensing against need, and reducing any over-licensing. Tool sets provide:

• A single point to track assignment and usage across multiple components
• Consolide and interpret information, with costs, to provide a budgeting dashboard, with the ability to drill down into any detail
• A more proactive approach, identifying areas for cost savings
• History and trending over a period of time (at least 180 days)
• Integration into existing budgeting and charging business processes
• Automatic discovery of users, assets ,and licensing across the network
• Streamline both user onboarding (ensuring the correct license package is assigned based on user persona or role) and offboarding (ensuring licenses are correctly freed up after a user leaves the organization)
• Audit existing deployments, including legacy PBX systems, identifying and removing ‘already-left’ users, migrated accounts, and guest accounts
• Deliver trend and usage patterns that can feed directly into capacity and budgeting processes

I’ve included below a sample budgeting dashboard, taken directly from VOSS Insights.

Next steps

You’ll find more details about cost analytics, here, or please get in contact here.

Organizations run on meetings. Many, many meetings. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index time spent in meetings increased by 200% through 2020. Ask anyone and back-to-back-to-back meetings are not only common but expected.

With people returning to the office, at least part time, an increasing number of these many meetings include people both in a meeting room and remote. According to the Cisco Global Workplace Survey, 98% of meetings will include at least one remote participant.

To better accommodate both in-office and remote participants, organizations are updating meeting rooms and many of these organizations are choosing Microsoft Teams Rooms for new meeting spaces.

With 300 million monthly active Teams users, it is not surprising that last year Cisco announced several of their devices were being certified for Microsoft Teams Room.

Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams

Cisco now offers certified Teams devices for all sizes of meeting rooms. Cisco has a reputation for delivering some of the highest quality video devices, often described as embodying “Scandifornian” design (combining Nordic simplicity with California fun) by Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Cisco Collaboration Devices.

Room Bar (left) and Room Bar Pro (right)

The Cisco Room Bar and Room Bar Pro provide high-quality video conferencing and content sharing for huddle rooms and medium-sized spaces respectively.

Room Kit EQ (left) Room Kit Pro (right)

The Room Kit EQ provides support for large meeting rooms while the Room Kit Pro device bundle has been designed for the largest spaces and for specialist AV scenarios.

Board Pro

If you want to be more collaborative, the Board Pro provides a video conferencing and co-creation device that is designed specifically for hybrid meetings in small or medium-sized spaces. The Board Pro can be wall mounted, equipped with a floor stand, or connected to a durable wheel-stand to enhance its portability.

Mixed Meeting Rooms

As device capabilities improve, most larger organizations are continually in a multi-year process of upgrading meeting spaces. This translates to the need to support many different meeting room devices, often from multiple vendors.

Individual vendors focus on providing management tools for their devices:

• Microsoft Teams Room Pro Management Portal
• Cisco Webex Control Hub
• Poly Lens
• Logitech Sync
• Zoom Rooms Admin Management

While each of these vendor-specific solutions works well, the reality is that most organizations need to support a multi-vendor UC and room environment.

A True Multi-Vendor Meeting Room Management Solution

VOSS has long been known for providing multi-vendor migration, management, monitoring, and analytic tools to simplify and accelerate multi-vendor UC deployments.

Now VOSS extends those capabilities into the meeting room, helping large organizations manage and monitor all their meeting rooms from a “single pane of glass”, in other words, a consolidated control application.

VOSS Automate allows you to automate room deployments and updates regardless of vendor. VOSS Insights provides monitoring, alerting, and analytics across all your meeting room devices.

A global overview of all meeting room devices

Beyond Basic Room Management

Meeting rooms are important, but they are only part of an effective communication and collaboration solution.

VOSS Insights can report on remote, in-person, and hybrid meetings regardless of the room or device being used, along with UC calls.

Meeting and call stats

Additionally, data from building management systems or other applications can be combined with meeting room data to provide unique insights such as:

• Comparative quality across meeting room devices from multiple vendors
• Occupancy and power usage data aligned with meeting room device usage
• Service desk tickets attributable to each device and/or room configuration

Power consumption and cost per sq ft meeting room stats

More Choice = Better Solutions

It is exciting to see Cisco with some of the best-in-class devices embrace the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. Having more choice means organizations are better able to optimize their meeting room experience, increasingly important in this on-going era of hybrid work.

The VOSS toolset makes it possible to choose components from multiple vendors without adding management burden and without losing any data driven insights.

To learn more about VOSS for Microsoft, please click here, or to get in touch with VOSS, please click here. To learn more about the author, Kevin Kieller, please click here.