Unified Communications and Managed Service Providers

Advice 2010-06-07 15:35

Ian McKay says many MSPs are acting as system integrators on UC projects and getting slim margins on kit sales, so any

Unified communications (UC) is expected to grow significantly as businesses seek to cut costs and enable more productive and flexible working.

Automating processes is critical because this significantly cuts the cost of managing the infrastructure. Some of these savings can be passed onto clients while also supporting a wider margin for the MSP.

Close management of a UC infrastructure for a client will be what makes or breaks a service. Any loss of dial tone can have a fatal effect on a contract. Having in place systems that monitor and resolve issues 24/7 is essential especially when a UC implementation goes live.
Automation
The experience of voice system managers is that they can get flooded with support calls that are time consuming to resolve. One characteristic problem with UC implementations is how an issue can be extremely transient; it appears and disappears in almost the blink of an eye, making it difficult to get to the root cause and apply an effective remedy before it gets out of control.

Automated processes to both monitoring and managing the system are attractive because they can absorb these support pressures and reduce workloads considerably. For an MSP this also makes it easier to support more hosted UC clients within a multi-tenanted hosted solution.

Unified Communications can be part of the MSP service mix. MSPs will discover that there is a real demand from end users to pass over responsibility for managing part or all of the system. The challenge will be having the right infrastructure in place to meet clients’ high expectations on support levels. Automation of application management therefore has a major role to play in how MSPs assume greater and wider responsibility for helping businesses embrace the opportunities presented by UC.