Business Analytics Comes to UCBusiness Analytics Comes to UC

Cost allocation needs to be based on the utilization of communications assets and on the consumption of UC services and devices.

Business analytics becomes more important in an advanced Unified Communications (UC) environment, rather than the traditional voice-only platform. Enterprises can benefit greatly from advanced business analytics when managing telecom expenses and UC service utilization.

Traditional analytics is centered around the device (a phone, fax or modem), ignoring the user. With the advent of UC and Presence, the user, and their available communications mode, now becomes the center of the relationship map. UC is user centric, not device centric.

This becomes evident with UC when a user starts a communication session using IM, switches to a voice call, then video, all within the same session.

Traditional voice platforms always had basic telecom expense management systems, which mediated the Call Detail Records (CDRs). With advanced UC, end-users now have access to a range of different services, depending on their role, as well as multiple devices (desk, softphone and mobile). A user's role may also change far more frequently than in the past, with short-term assignments to particular projects necessitating a different set of applications and access to different tools and networks working from different locations. This means that enterprise communications is not only becoming far more dynamic, but the scope of change is also more far-reaching.

Enterprises can no longer allocate costs across their organization based purely on the number of phone calls being made. Rather, cost allocation needs to be based on the utilization of communications assets and on the consumption of UC services and devices. Increasingly, the cost of enterprise communications is based on the volume of UC licenses that organizations are consuming at any one time.

Two leading OSS vendors, VOSS Solutions and ISI Telemanagement Solutions, have recently collaborated to integrate their respective UC service fulfillment and unified telecoms analytics systems. This solution has been shortlisted as one of the six finalists in the Best of Enterprise Connect 2012 competition. This year's award will be presented at Enterprise Connect Orlando on March 28. VOSS and ISI will be demonstrating their UC business analytics solution at the VOSS booth during Enterprise Connect.

This integrated solution provides business analytics and reporting for both traditional enterprise voice calling changes, plus the latest UC services, including: unified messaging, collaboration, mobility, presence and social media. Organizations will have access to real-time reports or on-screen dashboards that will allow them to track service utilization and resource consumption, as well as the traditional telecom expense management.

The ISI UC mediation engine takes the UC event changes and inventory levels from VOSS, and combines them with its traditional telecom call data record mediation solution. This produces and advanced, real-time, business analytics and reporting for unified communications applications.

With advanced UC fulfillment systems such as VOSS, enterprises will have access to not only the service data, but a rich set of business data that would otherwise be stored in a disjointed information structure, spread across their network infrastructure, time consuming and costly to aggregate. VOSS holds the relationship between each user and their:

1. Business hierarchy (i.e. where do they sit in the organization)
2. Network infrastructure (i.e. what shared resources do they consume)
3. UC services (i.e. which services are they consuming)
4. Devices (i.e. which devices are linked to them)

According to VOSS and ISI, there are a number of financial values and business benefits for the implementation of a Unified Communications Business Analytics Solution (UC-BAS):

* The total costs of UC will be measurable accurately for the first time. If you don't measure costs, then you cannot control those costs.

* UC costs can be allocated across the various business units on the more equitable basis of asset and license utilization. That is, a department that is using the collaboration service will have costs allocated according to their actual usage of that service.

* Enterprises will have access to a rich set of business data that would otherwise be spread across their network infrastructure and be time consuming and costly to aggregate, allowing them to better allocate resources.

* Enterprises will have the ability to provide real-time reports or on-screen dash-boards that allow them to track service utilization and resource consumption, as well as the traditional telecom expense management.

* License consumption and trunk utilization can be optimized through the use of business analytics, saving the enterprise considerable operating and capital costs.

* An enterprise's business units (or agencies) can gain real-time access to information on the communications services and resources they are consuming.

Without access to the latest business analytics tools, sourcing user-centric, UC service utilization data, enterprises will most likely oversubscribe to UC licenses and network resources. They will see their communications costs escalate unnecessarily.