Tom Tuttle (pictured) is vice president of the Microsoft practice at Nectar Services Corp., a solution provider based in Farmingdale, N.Y.

Today’s unified communications platforms have the potential to revolutionize how organizations communicate and collaborate while they boost efficiency, productivity and business agility. These benefits can only be realized when users adopt a platform’s capabilities and make them part of their day-to-day work processes. Adoption also hinges on the ability to effectively manage the ever evolving multi-vendor UC enterprise environment and deliver a consistent user experience that meets user needs and expectations.

As enterprises begin to roll out UC pilots, they realize pretty quickly that there’s a need to commit to a deployment approach sooner rather than later. For some, a cloud-based approach works best; for others, an on-premise platform best meets their organizations’ needs. However, there’s a very good chance many companies will use a hybrid approach as the UC cloud market continues to expand and mature.

Many solution providers and carriers have built hosted UC practices to help customers embrace the powerful combination of communication and collaboration tools that UC platforms enable. Amid this evolution, the need to help users be more efficient, more effective and more connected remains paramount.

Here are three key areas solution providers can focus on to manage the cloud momentum for their practices:

1. Preparation is the first key. At times, the industry oversimplifies a cloud deployment and creates the impression that it’s easy to plug and play. Just because an enterprise relocates server functions to a third-party cloud doesn’t mean requirements on the enterprise side change dramatically. Companies still need to validate the network and care for the end user. In fact, because you’re traversing a third-party transport domain, network assessments are even more important. It’s critical to incorporate an active monitoring solution into your deployment plans.

As users embrace UC and all it provides, traffic demands change and increase as they incorporate video and collaboration into the way they conduct business. The ability to validate that an enterprise infrastructure is ready for the UC shift can help confirm initial success. Beyond that, ongoing and active monitoring can help identify potential pain points in the enterprise environment before they become problems for end users.