Long gone are the days when business was confined to desktop PCs and an 8AM to 5PM working day. Today, the explosion of online, social and mobile technologies has paved the way for a 24/7 global workplace, with the distributed workforce viewed as a critical business enabler.
So says Brent Lees, senior product marketing manager, EMEA, Riverbed Technology, who notes that with employees now spread across multiple offices and borders, unified communications (UC) is often seen as the backbone of the business, keeping employees wired and working together.
However, he points out that despite its popularity, UC is one of the more complex services in the IT world and can be challenging and time-consuming to implement and manage.
According to Lees, a distributed workforce is a workforce that reaches beyond the restrictions of a traditional office environment. He explains that by installing key technologies, distributed companies enable employees located anywhere to access all of the company's resources and software such as applications, data and e-mail without working within the confines of a physical company-operated facility.
Successful communication
Thus, he is of the view that a large number of moving parts must work together smoothly to orchestrate a successful communication or collaboration session, though applications like conferencing, video, and team work have high-performance and always-on availability requirements to meet the high expectations of users.
"Perhaps one of the biggest problems is that end-user expectations are different for UC applications, particularly in the realms of voice and video. For example, people view an always-available dial tone as a given. So if they pick up the phone and there's no dial tone, they will be very frustrated. Also, many UC apps like voice and video must operate in real-time. If the user's voice isn't coming through the phone system near-instantaneously, it's a failed communication," says Lees.
It's also not just end-users that suffer, but businesses too, Lees states, adding that voice, e-mail and video communications are mission-critical capabilities for today's enterprise, so organisations cannot afford for any slowdown in communication. Poor performance and outages can lead to significant productivity losses and, worse still, security risks can damage brand reputation, he says.
For CIOs and IT teams responsible for supporting a UC system, says Lees, it can be challenging to troubleshoot and resolve performance issues.
He notes that maintaining a high degree of availability and control over other applications contending on the network can lead to system downtime and higher operational costs. Should application outages occur, it's imperative that IT operations, application and network teams are able to detect, isolate and fix the problem as quickly as possible, he urges.
"With all signs pointing towards the data deluge continuing, businesses need to be confident that they have access to all the information when striving to achieve a well-rounded picture of an application-performance problem.
"As part of this problem, organisations need a management tool that looks at the IT infrastructure and user experience from a holistic point of view. This means analysing the network, application and wider infrastructure simultaneously to determine what good performance looks like. Then, should a problem arise, the root of the cause can quickly be identified and addressed," Lees elaborates.
Boosting performance
He also notes that WAN optimisation and acceleration can increase performance on most applications, even for UC. However, there are elements of UC that cannot be optimised and accelerated and bandwidth hungry applications like video can be challenging.
Nevertheless, bandwidth can be freed-up by optimising other applications, potentially freeing up to 80% of the bandwidth, and offering more space for our voice and video, he says. "Also, by utilising QoS [quality of service], we can make sure that the time sensitive video and voice are given priority over the network verses less time critical traffic like e-mail."
He believes that by implementing tools that proactively manages the end-to-end UC life cycle, including new deployments, upgrades, and ongoing operations, companies can gain full visibility into the performance of UC applications at all times.
"Only by adopting a holistic approach to improving end-user experience, can companies be confident that unified communications applications are available and responsive regardless of where and when they are being accessed, leaving CIOs free to grow their business across locations without worrying about technology-related roadblocks," he concludes.
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