Dell's Unified Comm Suite Aids Data-Driven Decisions
-driven UC management platform. Aptly dubbed the Dell Unified Communications Command Suite (UCCS), the platform aims to help organizations gain better insights into their UC investments while also breaking down employee adoption barriers.
UCCS also promises to streamline the task of managing multiple communications platforms and offers reporting and diagnostic solutions on workforce activity, communication consumption, and system performance.
“IT is no longer the only part of the organization that needs more data and better analytics on their unified communications platforms,” said Curtis Johnstone, Senior Unified Communications product architect at Dell Software. “Business leaders require this insight to improve decision making and business outcomes and expect their UC investments to provide better tracking of customer engagements, service level agreements, marketing and sales initiatives, and much more.”
The UC Challenge
Here’s Dell Software’s pitch: Organizations are spending millions of dollars each year to assess, install and deploy UC solutions in the quest for a truly connected business. The challenge is a lack of accurate insights into how these solutions or used, or if they are used. Dell said its UC Command Suite is the market’s only solution to offer both analytics and diagnostics across Microsoft's Exchange and Lync platforms.
According to the Dell’s research on Microsoft Lync adoption and challenges, organizations that have adopted Lync cannot easily report on savings and 80 percent of organizations don’t have the reporting capabilities to tell them if they have met their cost reduction goals. The survey also reveals that a mere 17 percent of respondents have a dedicated Lync administrator.
As a result, the burden for full UC management tends to fall on IT administrators who are likely focused on other platforms, like Exchange. As Dell sees it, these statistics reinforce a knowledge gap within organizations in terms of who is responsible for managing, communicating with, and educating employees on UC platforms and ensuring high-quality network service.
Dell believes its new UC Command Suite will not only simplify all the management tasks related to unified communications but also give managers and C-suite executives the information they need to make better, more informed business decisions.
Getting More Out of UC
In a report titled “Top Technology Trends to Watch: 2014 to 2016," Forrester Research analyst Brian Hopkins addresses ways that enterprises can benefit by using more flexible processes and better analytics for managing unified communications.
Hopkins points out that analytics can help companies produce intelligent products and services that are of more value to consumers. Powerful analytics provide more information on product and service usage, and help companies plug into their ecosystem better by tapping data from partners, government entities, and data marketplaces. Overall, Hopkins concludes, these types of business intelligence tools can help companies make better strategic decisions by anticipating and detecting shifts in their market.
We caught up with Laurie McCabe, a partner in technology industry research, analysis and consulting firm SMB Group, to get her thoughts on Dell’s new UCCS solution. She told us she’s "bullish" on the prospects.
“The solution should help businesses get more out of their UC investments, including better capabilities to track both customer interactions across sales, marketing and services, as well as internal interactions, such as for help desk support,” McCabe said. “The analytics in Dell's suite give [businesses] the ability to get a better understanding of these activities so they can make better decisions.”
The new suite is currently available globally. Each UCCS component also is available individually. Pricing is $1,000 for 50 user accounts.