Trend Watch: Polycom Managed Services Augment Part...
jeffmconnolly
Standardized Managed Services delivery methodologies help vendors and customers work more effectively together to provide more reliable and stable IT support services.
"Managed Services," has come to mean a lot of different things to different people in the industry, and even within Polycom. More often than not, video services are not aligned with commonly accepted service delivery methodologies.
Managed Services for video grew up primarily surrounding Immersive TelePresence (ITP) environments. Customers that spent millions of dollars to obtain the latest and greatest studio experiences wanted to make sure that these business critical systems performed at their best - and vendors, including Polycom, developed customized remote monitoring, management, conferencing and network services to ensure their reliability and availability. These high-touch, customized, services had descriptors like "white-glove", "concierge" and "VNOC" and focused on high-touch, personalized service, most often involving human operators orchestrating, launching and actively managing these critical, C-suite centric meetings.
Mission-critical video has extended out of the boardroom and into conferencing rooms and desktops, more and more workers rely on video to support everyday work processes. As such, the reliability and availability of video has become more important to businesses around the world - and adherence to commonly practiced IT standards has become more important.
Industry standards-defined Managed Services for other IT applications have been prevalent and maturing for decades. Managed Services-savvy customers work with vendors that are primarily defined by industry standards that allow for easy understanding and operations of other business critical IT services, like telephony, networking, user desktop, printing, hosting, security, ERP and CRM systems, and myriad others.
ITIL, formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, was first developed by the British Government in the 80's as a set of recommendations to standardized practices for IT service management and is the most widely adopted guidance for IT service management worldwide. ITIL offers a number of benefits, including:
increased reliability, stability and availability of IT services through standardized practices, metrics, reporting and continual service improvement
improved customer and user satisfaction;
enhanced IT value through business and IT operational and goal alignment;
and more business efficiency and cost reduction through streamlining of IT processes.
Polycom's Managed Services organization is defined by ITIL standards. All of our service delivery methodology and reporting adhere to these standards to allow for better service reliability and quality, improved customer satisfaction and relationships, and seamless integration with customers that have adopted ITIL standards as a way to optimize the IT services they provide to their end users.
For Polycom, "Managed Services" means ITIL, and our adherence to these standards brings all the benefits of these standards in the form of better outcomes for partners, our customers and their end-users.
Read the related press release: New Polycom Services Help IT Expand the Power and Potential of Workplace Collaboration
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