Why Unified Communications – Analytics?

With UC– Analytics, you’re able to improve and protect your business by turning the data trapped in your communications systems into understandable, usable and engaging insight into workforce activities, business processes and UC infrastructure needs. UC– Analytics gives IT and users the intelligence to:

• Improve adoption
• Increase ROI
• Speed up migrations
• Enforce communication policies
• Meet business objectives
• Chargeback Exchange, SFB, and Cisco activity

Common challenges most customers have to deal with Unified Communications:

1. Limited insights into UC environment to properly plan and scope a migration project and infrastructure needs.
2. Lack of usage, trends and adoption insights on a Lync
3. Limited analytics on workforce activity.
4. Poor Lync Voice quality of experience - No diagnostics to easily troubleshoot and resolve performance and availability concerns and inability to ensure optimum quality of experience.
5. Limited Time – manage multiple platforms, responding to requests, meeting SLAs, etc.
6. Lack of Expertise - Inexperience with managing an in-house replacement for traditional 3rd party voice and video communication systems.

UC-Analytics Key features:

1. Aggregated Analytics - A single view of aggregated analytics from on-premises and online UC solutions, enabling the analysis of usage and trends, leading to increased user productivity and the enforcement of communications policies.
2. DIY Insights and Dashboard - Business managers can simply and quickly build and customize dashboards without technical training, providing easy-to-understand intelligence on communication trends and usage of their teams.
3. Improved Quality of Experience - UC-Analytics provide quality-of-experience reporting to help administrators offer optimal end-user experiences for audio and visual communications and voice over IP calls.
4. Improved Business Decision Making - Data previously trapped inside separate UC systems can be transformed into actionable intelligence on workforce activities, communications consumption, business processes, SLA adherence, personal use of company communications systems, and more.
5. Faster, Easier Migrations - UC-Analytics enables administrators to inventory current environments and perform capacity planning for new deployments, reducing time and risk for migrations. There are 41 Insights with the migration tag. Some of the examples are Inventory, DAG inventory, mail contacts, inactive mail contacts, public folders, inactive public folders, public folders with no items.
6. Increased ROI - Administrators can increase their return on investment in UC solutions by understanding quality of experience and usage, and encouraging adoption of UC solutions.
7. Secured Communications - UC-Analytics provides data leak prevention and monitoring to ensure communication polices are enforced, reducing risks to the business.
8. UC Consolidation – Lync vs Cisco. You can compare your environments and their usage in a single insight which will help the customer understand their adoption rates and help them make a decision on which environment is better and where they need to invest to improve the environments even further.
9. UC Adoption - Lync adoption, Cisco adoption. There are 9 adoption insights. Organizations can gain actionable insight into the quality and adoption of their unified communications solutions, thereby greatly improving their chances of long-term success.
10. Support - With UC- Analytics we can support up to 500K mailboxes on-premises and 200K mailboxes in Office 365.

Here are some examples of how companies could use UC– Analytics Insights to save money:

1. UC Consolidation – Customers could check the Cisco usage and Skype For Business (SFB) usage. They could check the quality of calls in their SFB environment and then consolidate to one platform and save money rather than supporting multiple UC platforms.
2. Help Desk time savings – One customer in UK displays UC-Analytics on a big screen in front of their help desk personnel. The quality of calls is grouped by the buildings and floors in their office and the help desk personnel can answer questions instantly looking at UC-Analytics and checking the percentage of good or bad calls at every building. They can dig deeper in to call quality issues and see the call quality metrics that are exceeding the thresholds underlined in red in UC-Analytics This helps them diagnose whether it is network issue, server issue, or end point issue.
3. Chargeback Exchange, SFB, Cisco activity – Chargebacks for SFB or Cisco calls are very granular. You can match the service providers’ charges by picking chargeback for calls based on every gateway and provide different charges for calls going from a particular gateway to every city in the world. You can round up to minutes or round up to seconds for Enterprise Voice calls in SFB and Cisco. For Japanese customers the Service providers charge them by rounding up to every 30 seconds, the customer can match those settings in UC-Analytics.
4. Data Leak prevention – DLP infractions will all be reported in the UC-Analytics DLP Insights. This could save companies millions in liability and law suits.
5. Sales or Support personnel productivity – VP of sales or support group could check the response time of every member in their organization and compare them across their Sales or Support organization. They can check response time to the customers, partners etc. They can also check if someone in their sale organization is talking to the competitors.
6. Audits – HR personnel can easily audit a certain person and all their communication within seconds.
7. SLA – UC -Analytics can easily show how many messages were delivered to all participants within the SLA time period. UC- Analytics could show percentage of messages delivered within specified time period. The messages that are not delivered within the SLA time period will be underlined in red.
8. Value - Customers are getting 3 times the value compared to MessageStats in terms of number of Insights and much better slicing and dicing capabilities.

Examples of few important Insights and how it will solve your business problems:

Find messages sent to competitor, partner, customer – This can help you check the productivity of your sales and support organization. It can also help you detect if information is being leaked to your competitor.

Mobile devices activity, summary Inactive mobile devices - UC platforms, with their limited reporting capabilities, present a challenge for administrators. When evaluating policy compliance, it is important that administrators review both user and device activity. This can become critical when supporting BYOD mobile devices, where an older OS can represent a significant security risk, and unsupported devices may not interoperate with UC systems or corporate.

Platforms Activity Chargeback - This insight displays a graph over time of the amount of chargeback for each UC platform. It displays a list breaking out the chargeback to each department for Exchange, Skype for Business, and Cisco UCM.

Skype for Business vs Cisco Conferencing Usage - It is often important for administrators to compare usage across UC platforms.

Skype for Business / Lync– QOE Summary - One reason why users may not adhere to UC policy is poor quality during UC sessions. This insight provided comprehensive call quality information, including a graph over time of the percentage of calls with good quality, poor quality, or unknown quality.

To learn more about Unified Communications Analytics

• See the difference yourself in these screenshots
• Explore the online demo
• Download the trial
• Learn about the vision from product management and watch other helpful videos
• Get technical documents and deployment guides

UC– Analytics is also part of the broader Unified Communications Command Suite (UCCS) being the only solution on the market to offer both analytics and diagnostics across Microsoft Exchange and Lync. That’s probably one of the big reasons why it is the 2015 TMCNet Unified Communications Product of the Year recipient.