Last year at Enterprise Connect the UCStrategies team introduced the concept of Business Communications Operations Management (BCOM). A year later, the segment has seen increasing recognition as a key element of a successful Business Communications implementation. As UCStrategies continues the journey and becomes BCStrategies (Business Communications Strategies), we continue to see the importance of planning for configuring, changing and operating the complexity of today’s communications solutions.
Over the last year the industry has seen more movement to multiple vendor solutions, with UC capabilities like Skype for Business being deployed to augment an existing PBX solution. In fact, a recent NoJitter poll showed that about 43% of organizations that have made a next gen BC decision have decided on a multi-vendor approach. The result is that BCOM has increasing value to organizations deploying these and other complex solutions.
For customers of BCOM solutions using an advanced solution to manage the operation of a business communications solution significantly reduces the cost and frees up trained technical staff for new projects and driving adoption. Also, the automation provided by leading BCOM vendors ensures that changes and configurations will be implemented without errors. As Zeus Keravalla pointed out at last year’s Enterprise Connect panel on BCOM, configuration errors cause more than 30% of outages.
BCOM continues to demonstrate the ability to enhance the delivery and operation of today’s complex business communications. For example, VOSS Solutions helped CDK Global reduce their operational staff time by over 50%. This reflects the experiences of many BCOM users that report dramatic savings in staff time. In fact, savings of up to 70% have been reported. These savings enable staff to focus on the critical next steps in providing the ever-changing business communications environment.
Mike Frayne, CEO of VOSS Solutions said in a recent discussion, “Customers are increasingly seeing the value of BCOM as the business communication system footprint grows through mutli-vendor and multi-technology deployments. VOSS Solutions is seeing dramatic growth in the adoption of BCOM in solving the operational issue of business communications.” Mike will be a panelist on the EC Summit: Managing Communications in a Changing Environment Panel on Thursday, March 10, at 10:30 a.m. at the upcoming Enterprise Connect in Orlando.
Beyond the traditional communications deployment model, BCOM is proving to be a critical element in delivering cloud-based Communications as a Service (CaaS). With the growing interest in cloud and CAPEX-based models for business communications deployment driving aggressive price competition, a BCOM solution is a major component of managing the change process that these new environments generate. For cloud and hosted service providers, the challenge of operating a best-of-breed solution is huge. While service providers need to choose a range of solution components designed to enable their offer to be differentiated in value and delivery, the complexity of configuring and changing the range of vendors and elements is growing virtually exponentially. This need, combined with the need for self-service and self-configuration, is driving the adoption of BCOM across the cloud spectrum.
Edouard De Fonclare, CEO of Kurmi says, “While BCOM is essential for premise deployments, it is critical for cloud communications service providers. Over the past months we have seen a rapid increase in the adoption of BCOM solutions for ensuring that cloud providers have the tools they need to cost-effectively deliver this solution for their customers.”
At Enterprise Connect, BCOM will be featured in the Summit Panel on Thursday as well as in a number of other sessions. Both VOSS Solutions and Kurmi Software, leading BCOM providers, will be at Enterprise Connect. You can visit VOSS Solutions in Booth 1232, while Kurmi will be holding private meetings with Service Providers and larger Enterprises. For Enterprise Connect attendees wishing to meet with either company, they can be reached at the email addresses below.
Kurmi – pascal.moindrot@kurmi-software.com
VOSS Solutions – rachel.chicken@voss-solutions.com
