2. Visibility to defend the edge. Maintaining a view of the entire UC delivery environment – including the network and servers – and staying in front of any enterprise issues that will inevitably occur allow problems to be identified and isolated in real time. Visibility of the enterprise’s UC ecosystem, given the common existence and nature of multi-vendor environments, allows service providers the ability to differentiate their cloud delivery support models.

For example, quality of service breakdowns that occur in the enterprise network outside the cloud can be difficult to detect and isolate, potentially leading to network congestion and frustrated end users. That’s why it’s so important to have the ability to defend the delivery edge and quickly bracket or demarcate an issue between the provider, the transport domain and the enterprise customer. Real-time visibility across the UC environment makes it easier to manage this process as a whole, and leads to an optimum end-user experience and quicker adoption.

This ability to measure performance and adoption of voice, video, conferencing and collaboration in the UC environment can make the difference for the operations team and end users during a pilot or early rollout. If the enterprise UC network doesn’t deliver the reliable functionality, users need to do their jobs and will not embrace the added functionality as quickly as expected, making them less effective. Monitoring solutions can proactively manage service quality, recognize problem areas in real time, and quickly isolate the root cause, leading to faster resolution of the service. In these situations, time is of the essence and the longer it takes to identify, isolate and resolve service problems, the greater the impact to your end users and overall productivity.

3. Build a strong relationship with your cloud delivery partner. Not all clouds are created equal, but each can provide key advantages for the channel as they navigate through the push to a UC cloud delivery model. The closer these relationships and the greater visibility these delivery partners can provide, the more completely and effectively you can support your enterprise customers.

New Revenue Opportunities?

What solution providers may come to find is that incorporating some of these best practices to better manage cloud and hybrid environments may create new revenue opportunities. Solution providers will be broadening their managed service portfolios while reducing their costs of managing various modes of communication with the ability to promptly detect and bring quick resolution to network issues. With greater visibility into the performance of UC networks and applications, solution providers can now redirect their costly IT resources to boost productivity, increase service delivery capability and create new paths to customer loyalty.

Unified communications networks will revolutionize end-user organizations. But with the right management tools and processes, these networks can make solution providers more profitable and increasingly efficient.