By Gary Audin
Not everything can be exciting in Unified Communications (UC). There are always tasks to perform especially in everyday ongoing operations besides the UC implementation project. Service fulfillment is one of those areas that needs to be performed. It does not have glamor associated with it, nor is it something most IT staff wants to get involved with performing, even though it can reduce the TCO.
Communications fulfillment is the act or process of delivering a multi-service UC environment to a customer. This fulfillment process means inputting detailed configuration to multiple applications systems. It’s time consuming to do manually, can delay service, prone to errors, and requires a high skilled engineer.
Christopher May of Voss
I interviewed Christopher May is the Co-founder and VP Business Development, VOSS Solutions. VOSS provides a fulfillment platform for service providers and large enterprises to successfully deliver collaboration services in the public and private cloud. VOSS enables their customers to activate and manage enterprise collaboration services in real time through secure, role based portals by simplifying the design, delivery and management of collaboration services.
My first question for Chris was “What is the need for a product like VOSS, why does it exist?”
“VOSS is an automated service fulfillment platform, specifically designed for advanced enterprise collaboration networks. VOSS replaces the complex manual configuration process that requires highly skilled engineers.
Service fulfillment systems have existed for many years in the telecom service provider space, but have now entered the enterprise communications market. There are three main drivers today for service fulfillment in the enterprise collaboration space:
- Collaboration services add complexity to an already complex IP voice infrastructure. Organizations need to hire skilled engineers to run these platforms. Organizations ultimately become dependent upon those key engineers. And yet many administration tasks are highly repetitive and mundane, which leads to those engineers losing job satisfaction. To avoid this phenomenon, highly repetitive technical tasks can be automated by fulfillment systems. Automation improves standardized configuration and removes the risk of manual error. It also lowers the dependence upon key staff.
- Organizations today understand the inefficiency of each business unit or agency (or location) operating their own communications system. More sophisticated enterprise architectures are being implemented, which means supporting multiple business units or agencies (locations) from a central data center. Central IT organizations are now responsible for the entire enterprise-wide communications platform, delivering advanced services to the separate business units much like a mini-service provider. However, business units want to maintain control of mission critical communication services. The local IT team can now manage their own services and users, while utilizing a shared, central network infrastructure.
- In the current world of instant online access, it has become unacceptable for users to have to wait 24 or 48 hours for a communications service change. Companies are under pressure from cloud providers to offers users access to a business portal to manage their own services in real-time. Service fulfillment systems provide a business layer with a real-time administration portal for end-users.
The second question was “How does a fulfillment platform improve and enterprise TCO?”
“VOSS has recently completed a detailed TCO study with Mainstay-Salire (a leading TCO analyst firm). The results of this work will be converted into a TCO calculator on the VOSS website (www.voss-solutions.com ) shortly, which will allow companies to easily customize a TCO analysis for their own size and scope. Importantly, Mainstay-Salire worked with VOSS customers to validate this TCO model.
The results show that over a 5 year period, TCO savings of $300 – $500 per end-user are achievable, depending on the underlying assumptions selected. At the lower end of the results, this equates to a payback of well under 12 months for an investment in VOSS.
Nemertes Research has independently developed similar order of magnitude TCO savings based on empirical research from over 1,000 enterprise customers. Nemertes shows annual savings of around $170 per end-user from specialty management tools, which equates to a net present value over 5 years of roughly $600. This validation from independent research should give enterprises a high degree of comfort when building a business case for UC service fulfillment.”
Visit www.voss-solutions.com
