UC integration: Single-vendor Environment and multi-vendor Environment

The user needs to improve the degree of UC integration. Enterprises must choose to use a single vendor product to meet UC requirements, or focus on the best features and features, and select the supplier environment. Although it is a good choice to select a vendor to solve interoperability and integration problems, the multi-vendor environment allows enterprises to select the technology that best suits user needs and business needs.

How to make a choice may be affected by the size of the enterprise and its industry. Some companies insist on selecting a single vendor to simplify usage and ensure interoperability with other systems, such as email, voice, video conferencing, mobile and real-time communication, and collaboration platforms. Other enterprises may have business units with different requirements and need to provide users with UC platforms with special features.

UC integration: overcome interoperability problems

For UC, interoperability is important because users want their communication tools to achieve seamless collaboration with Wainhouse Research partners and senior analyst Ira Weinstein, although companies may have deliberately avoided multi-vendor environments in the past, many people are re-examining their strategies because suppliers are optimizing their UC products to "collaborate" with other vendors ". "Integration is an important part of UC, but it is also the reason why it is difficult for suppliers to expand ."

According to the latest Research by Osterman Research, an analytics firm in Washington, some vendors in the UC market are able to provide cloud services, statuses, and interoperability on their platforms. "Suppliers may not perform well in terms of interoperability," said Michael Osterman Research, President. Enterprises must make choices-you have the right to decide how to select an integrated supplier ."

Bryan Mundy is a network operation manager in Westville, Ohio. He recently integrated UC using Esnatech's collaborative application server, it combines Google Apps used in the city and Mitel phone systems that support SIP. Esnatech integrates the Mitel IP telephone system with the city's Gmail, Google Talk, and status services. Westville recently migrated to the Mitel telephone system, so this integration is the city's main demand. Mundy said: "users will certainly like Gmail voice messages with flexible access ."

Westville saves a lot of money in its multi-vendor hybrid cloud environment. In addition, Osterma points out that other companies can also save UC and telephone costs in the hybrid supplier approach. "For enterprises, one of the true advantages of adopting a multi-vendor environment is to avoid being constrained by a certain supplier," he said. Enterprises Adopting this open method can reduce the cost of UC, and can also mix functions of different vendors ."

Large enterprises may be more likely to achieve UC Integration

Osterman pointed out that large enterprises seem to use multiple vendors in the UC strategy. For these decision makers, This is a technology of high quality and low price ." Irwin Lazar, Vice President and service director of Nemertes Research, points out that for large enterprises, the multi-vendor environment is the most attractive if their different business departments have different UC application and feature requirements. "In enterprises, some teams need specialized voice processing platforms, while others use video conferencing technology," he said ." Different departments of large enterprises will find the best features that best suit their businesses. No solution can solve all problems. "In addition to SMB, other large enterprises rarely use a single vendor environment," he added ."

The emergence of hosted UC services gives enterprises another way to implement a multi-vendor environment. Lazar said: "hosting UC actually does not belong to a single-vendor solution, but it looks like a single-vendor solution from the customer's perspective ." These hosted UC services support excellent front-end UC integration and customer support, which can integrate multi-vendor services into a single-vendor environment.

Weinstein pointed out that as suppliers continue to expand their product lines, enterprises may tend to adopt products from a single supplier. "Vendors realize that they cannot implement all the features," he said. Suppliers strive to enter the UC field and are filling the gaps in these products through mergers and acquisitions and cooperation ."

Lazar pointed out that suppliers have also begun to establish strategic alliances and strive to achieve better UC integration with other supplier platforms, while providing enterprises with the best solutions. Weinstein said: "I think we will see a situation like this: 'If you cannot win everything, I have to win at least some of them. 'The supplier must realize that the customer is the choice, and the current solution should support the multi-vendor environment ."