Unified communications management

Unified communications (UC) management is essentially the management of unified communications; it refers to the systems used by enterprise organizations to automate their enterprise communications services and the voice network infrastructure that those services run over (i.e. how they connect to the PSTN).
History.
As with most technologies, as UC evolves from early adopter to mass market adoption, the focus changes from service features to service quality and cost. As the UC technology lifecycle matures, the focus on UC management increases.
The need for UC management has evolved from the growing complexity that surrounds next generation communications environments. As the demands on a company’s communication platform increases – with the introduction of new UC services and applications – the task for an IT team to manage the platform manually becomes more and more complex. Employees need to be trained in multiple systems and the company needs to invest in separate ticketing systems, knowledge systems and reporting systems to manage the complexity.
UC management, and its ability to automate complex business processes, introduce repeatable administrative tasks and centralize the operation of the entire corporate communications platform, is becoming increasingly appealing. Ticketing systems, reporting systems and knowledge systems are all replaced by a central UC management platform.
More recently, unified communications services have moved into the cloud and have become UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service). All UCaaS providers use advanced UC management platforms to manage their cloud services. These UC management platforms must be able to support multiple customers (often referred to as multi-tenant).
UC management vendors include: VOSS Solutions, Arcana, Ensim, Kurmi, Tivoli, NAV360, SpanLink, UBiqube, SoftLink, Metreos, Leonid Systems, Fidelus, Uplinx, Variphy, Visionael, Voyence, ATEA, Sector Six. Most UC vendors are also creating their own UC management solutions, as they realize that the market adoption of their applications will be much higher if management is in place.
Unified communications.
Unified communications (UC) refers to a set of enterprise communications applications that improves business and individual productivity. Applications include:
The key to unified communications is the “unified”. It means that all these applications work together in a seamless way. An example might be a user starts an IM with a contact, they switch to a voice call, they invite a 3rd person to join the call, they switch the call to a video and web conference and invite several more people, some of whom are on the road and others are working from home. They finally record the conference and post it to a personal meeting room.
Unified communications (UC) management is a software solution that automates the configuration of all the UC application services, the end-user devices and the underlying network infrastructure (such as gateways, switches, session boarder controllers and the inter-connecting trunks). Unified communication applications do not work out of the box. They need to be configured before they will work seamlessly, and there are many thousands of settings available to create a highly customized solution for each company’s unique requirements.
Importantly, UC management also provides: 
Uses.
UC management’s primary use is to reduce the total cost of ownership of enterprise communications. Administration tasks that might otherwise have taken many hours to configure manually can be automated, therefore taking less time to complete and becoming less costly to the company. A UC management platform can support organizations throughout the lifecycle of a UC service:
UC management introduces significant productivity benefits as a few key strokes can trigger complex, multi-step workflow processes automatically and without human intervention. This improves administration efficiency and also reduces the skill levels required, freeing up the highly skilled engineers to focus on more value-adding tasks.
UC management also improves the quality of the UC experience. By ensuring that set-up and change management is performed in a highly accurate (i.e. no human errors) and highly repeatable (i.e. the design is implemented correctly on a consistent basis) fashion, the productivity of the company as a whole is improved.
UC management improves the end customer experience, as it opens up self-care opportunities to solve problems in real-time, and to make changes to settings at the touch of a button, from a mobile device.
UC management also provides a single point of integration between the organization’s IT systems (e.g. cost accounting, or HR system) and the communications platform. Without UC Management, there would need to be a separate point of integration from each IT system to every UC application server. This would become an integration “spiders-web”.
Technology.
UC management technology is based around intelligent workflow management, but with specialized UC drivers. The objective of UC management is to create a set of standard processes for very complex, multi-service, multi-device, multi-network configuration workflows.
The way that most management tools work is to have a fixed design, which allows the configuration variables to be abstracted into templates and maintains workflow as standard processes. Automation of the initial configuration of a UC platform is only possible if there can be a standard process to follow. You cannot automate a totally variable process. Hence the fixed design is abstracted into templates.
Once the platform is deployed with the fixed design, the UC management technology holds the entire configuration centrally and so can then easily apply change control processes effortlessly.
In some cases, UC management vendors opt not to try to standardize the set-up processes, as this is seen to be too complex. Instead they perform a “sync” process with the application servers to learn what configuration has been applied. This approach limits these management tools to purely an administrative role for change management (otherwise known as “moves, adds, changes and deletes MACDs). The initial configuration of the UC servers and the network infrastructure is still performed manually by engineers and the UC automation is applied to a fully working system. This limits the benefits, but is a simple to apply management approach.
The very latest UC management technology can operate in either of the above modes:
But most importantly, the latest technology can support hybrid solutions. In other words, they can support a mix of operational modes and multiple vendor platforms.
Better still, a very small group of vendors have completely changed the UC management model, such that there is no standardization used. These vendors have adopted the latest web technology to allow their business portals to be “self-generating”. This means that the user interfaces are no longer fixed by hard coded software. Once the user interfaces are no longer fixed, this means that even workflow can be templated.
The net result of this approach is to enable total customization of the UC management platform. This means that the design can be totally flexible, and can even be changed over time. The value of this approach is initially going to be felt in the large enterprise market and UCaaS cloud UC markets. But over time, it is expected that this new technology will be applied across the industry and all vendors will follow suit.