how to choose your unified communication and collaboration platform vendor · 2014-11-18 · best...

best practice guide

How to choose your Unified Communication and Collaboration Platform Vendor

best practice guide | How to choose your Unified Communication and Collaboration Platform Vendor

Contents

1. Whose unified communication and collaboration solution should I choose? 3

1.1. Why is it so difficult to choose? 3

2. How do I understand what is important to my business 4

3. What are the options? 6

4. How do the vendors compare 7

4.1 Microsoft 8

4.2 Cisco 9

4.3 Avaya 10

5. How can Dimension Data help? 11

List of Figures

Figure 1: Product differentiation over time 3

Figure 2: The four key drivers that influence a UCC purchase 4

Figure 3: Vendor comparison 7

Figure 4: Dimension Data’s analysis of Microsoft Lync 8

Figure 5: Dimension Data’s analysis of Cisco Unified Communications 9

Figure 6: Dimension Data’s analysis of Avaya Unified Communications 10


1. Whose unified communication and collaboration solution should I choose?

Dimension Data and Ovum1 conducted primary research to understand the trends and strategies associated with unified communications and collaboration (UCC). The results suggest that 78% of organisations have a strategic plan to adopt UCC. However, many have struggled with the conflicting and often complex decisions required to execute their strategy with the existing vendor solutions in the marketplace. This guide outlines the challenges associated with choosing a UCC vendor platform and provides guidance on how to build a requirements matrix, before finally outlining Dimension Data’s view of three major UCC vendors.

1.1. Why is it so difficult to choose?A combination of technological innovations and conflicting messages from vendors is creating issues for clients trying to determine the correct investment path to meet their business needs. One frustrated manager, working in a major financial organisation asked Dimension Data, ‘Why is it so difficult?’

The primary challenge for IT decision-makers is to build a business case to justify the significant financial investment. A manager in a large consumer electronics company highlighted the problem; ‘it’s tougher now than ever to get investment. I need to engage higher to get sign off’, which neatly illustrates the need to build robust justifications in business drivers.

However, the typical approach of building a return on investment model has been challenged by the absence of ‘hard’ metrics to measure. Travel costs and office consolidation are valid, but the key justification (for unified communications) of worker productivity is virtually impossible to quantify.

Companies are rightly resistant to wholesale replacement of functioning investments.

All the major vendors offer a migration model to adopt new feature sets. However, clients looking to move from one vendor to another will face a struggle to justify the disposal of significant investments in devices, licenses, and staff skills for a perceived incremental change in capability.

These challenges are not entirely financial, with people and organisational politics also playing a major part. IT leadership must acknowledge the loyalty of their staff to a technology vendor that justifies their roles, but most importantly, the shift in the skill sets required by their organisation if they adopt a new solution. Forward thinking organisations have started to bring together desktop and service-focused roles with their networking and voice counterparts, to help eliminate competition and drive increased collaboration on projects.

Subsequently, organisations have looked to third parties for advice on the right path to take. The Internet, industry experts, and legions of analysts offer increasingly in depth analysis of products, roadmaps, and market share, but fall short in one key area: how will this work for my business, ‘what’s in it for me?’

‘ It’s tougher now than ever to get investment. I need to engage higher to get sign off.’

1 http://www.dimensiondata.com/global/solutions/ucc/index.html

‘ A manager at a major financial organisation asked Dimension Data, ‘why is it so difficult?.’

Figure 1: Product differentiation over time

Customer use case

Time / product evolution

Technical features

Differentiation

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Equally, working with manufacturers, organisations have attempted to understand product roadmaps and match their evolving business requirements against vendor promises. This methodology has proved fruitful for some organisations willing to align their IT strategy with a single vendor, yet difficult for those with complex multivendor investments or unique requirements. In addition, ongoing consolidation and acquisition activity has also caused confusion with multiple products, fragmented user experiences, and confusing and often changing roadmaps. Subsequently this approach has exposed clients to significant business risk from vendor lock-in, roadmap slip, and products that fail to deliver.

Risk is the often overstated but central consideration in the choice between competing offerings. Organisations wanting to minimise risk in technology buying decisions, will look at the capabilities of a particular solution and try to build a scorecard based upon the stated

feature sets. Some organisations will rate technology features against a priority matrix, which elevates some capabilities above others. However, in the case of unified communication technologies this approach is becoming increasingly redundant.

It is widely recognised that the technical differentiators of a product erode over time as competing offerings duplicate their functionality (Figure 1). However, vendors typically maintain differentiation in particular market verticals for much longer, due to specific use cases that become standard practice. Today, all the major vendors offer a viable unified communications proposition, some as a monolithic single integrated offering, but most often as a combination of technologies from acquisitions and partnerships, which can meet any organisational requirement. It could be argued that 2014 is the year when the technical argument between the vendors becomes increasingly redundant.

Organisations must now look to alternative approaches to reduce the risk in their decision-making process, and bring general agreement to their procurement strategy.

2. How do I understand what is important to my business

This guide describes why organisations need to understand their organisational drivers in order to make an informed choice on technology, as opposed to only comparing feature sets. So how do organisations go about collating the relevant material?

In the first instance, it is important to understand the issues that influence the decision, and their role in the process. The four key drivers are:

Figure 2: The four key drivers that influence a UCC purchase

People Understanding their

perceptions and use cases is key for success.

FinancialUC is rarely deployed into a new environment, the existing investments and the cost difference of upgrade opposed to replace can be the biggest deciding factor for business.

OperationsWhat applications are deployed and the skills a client has to deploy, and support them is fundamental to a decision.

StrategyPracticalities can often be overridden or made redundant by a changed strategy. A significant acquisition, re-organisation, or office move can enable greater change to occur. Cloud delivery models can remove the need for complex support organisations, and provide a disruptive economic model.

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Business Driver Factor in play What to consider

People • Blend of worker types, their use cases and work styles.

• Device and tools strategy.

• Staff expectation (bring your own device etc.)

• Who are your staff? Where and how do they work? Who do they work with?

• What tools do they need? What tools are essential for their jobs? What key features of their existing tools are indispensable? What are the three key activities that could be optimised and would make them more productive?

• What devices do they use? Can they bring their own devices?

• Which business unit is driving the requirement? Why?

Financial • Prior technology investments and lifecycle.

• Acquisition cost.

• Migration and implementation cost.

• Operational cost.

• What do we currently have? Does it still have a residual book value? Can it be upgraded? What licensing do we have? Is it end of life?

• What is the total cost of hardware, licensing, and associated delivery services? What impact will it have on other platforms? Do I need to factor in the cost of supporting services, such as bandwidth?

• What will be the cost of change? What if I do nothing? Who will be impacted?

• How much will it cost to run? What are the support costs? What about staff?

Operations • Key line of business applications in use.

• Application integration.

• Internal and externally available skill sets.

• Support models.

• What applications do I run my business on? Do I want to integrate with them? Do I have the skills in house?

• What skills do I have to deploy, maintain, and support the investment? Will I retrain my staff, recruit, or resize my organisation?

• Do I need support from external parties? How will I manage the lifecycle of the solution?

Strategy • Risk.

• Partners and suppliers

• Competitive pressures.

• How do I want to consume the service?

• Company objectives.

• Regulations.

• Who are my business partners and suppliers? Would I benefit from federation or inter-company video? What technology do they use?

• Who are my competitors? What are they using?

• How does my business want to consume technology? Should we own or subscribe? What about security, privacy, and availability?

• Is the company looking to relocate? Or consolidate office space? Are you looking to globalise or better ‘connect’ your teams?

• What regulatory considerations are there?

To help clients, Dimension Data has listed the key business drivers and contributing factors into a table, with some key questions to consider.

It is imperative that organisations work with key stakeholders across the business, and include them in the decision-making process. A series of workshops to consider the business drivers, prioritise, and

understand their relevance to the business should be held. The output can be used to create a framework to compare vendors’ solutions against.

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Organisations should then work with a UCC systems integrator, such as Dimension Data, to map their requirements and work with the key vendors to create suitable solutions and pricing models for comparison.


2. Continue with your Cisco/Avaya deployment – organisations should immediately rationalise their investments in Microsoft licensing and technology to those required to deliver their application needs. A detailed analysis of the vendor roadmap should be made, and investments made only in the chosen technologies of each vendor.

3. Hybrid – the business drivers (or historical investments) necessitated the integration of at least two solutions. Organisations should take care in deciding which vendor delivers key functionality, and should simplify their unified communications architecture to minimise duplication and operational costs. Organisations should also rationalise their investments in Microsoft or Cisco/Avaya licensing to those required to deliver their integration needs. In hybrid deployments the organisations should favour the IP telephony solution over Lync Enterprise Voice. Organisations should also consider solutions from Pexip or Acano,

which create conferencing environments to bring together users on disparate platforms. These solutions enable interoperability between multi-vendor solutions, for example Cisco and Polycom video solutions, which until now has been a significant issue for many video users and hindered the value of video communications

4. Cloud-delivered UCC – it is possible to purchase and deliver each vendor’s technology using a cloud (hosted) delivery model, enabling a customer to consume the service on a per-user basis. Organisations should still conduct a detailed analysis of the drivers towards a particular vendor, as many cloud propositions allow the migration of licences and configurations to their platforms in order to reduce costs and drive adoption. First-time adopters of cloud services should ensure their underlying network and management infrastructure is assessed to ensure suitability.

3. What are the options?

Organisations who complete a thorough analysis of their requirements will end up with four distinct options, which are:

• adopt Microsoft Lync

• upgrade or deploy Cisco/Avaya

• accept a hybrid solution (using components from each vendor or a third-party integration solution)

• embrace cloud-delivered UCC

Choosing any one of these will have implications, however you must follow with a focused investment and decommissioning plan. Dimension Data makes the following recommendations:

1. Adopt Microsoft Lync wholesale – organisations should cease investments in their existing telephony solution(s) and focus investment on the delivery and adoption of Microsoft Lync. Organisations should standardise supporting infrastructure (for example video hardware or gateways) to minimise architectural complexity and ensure consistent support models.

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4. How do the vendors compare

Despite the shrinking technical differences between solution sets, each vendor has some differences. In many cases this difference is architecture based or illustrates their product heritage. The following analysis represents a summary of industry opinion and analyst direction. It also includes a table detailing Dimension Data’s opinions regarding the strengths and weakness of three key vendors.

For the purposes of this document, Dimension Data defines unified communications as including the capabilities in the table to the right of this text. The three vendors described below provide these capabilities, either as a native part of the product set, or by integrating with other vendor’s technology.

Dimension Data has created a diagram (Figure 3 : Vendor comparison) based upon a feature comparison conducted by its consulting organisation. It outlines the core competencies of the three vendors covered by this report, but also highlights the heritage of their entry into the UCC market.

Instant messaging and presence

Email

IP telephony

Contact centre

Audio and Web conferencing

Visual communications (room and desktop)

Unified messaging

Federation and interoperability

Communications-enabled business processes/application integration

Document management and Taskflow software

Social

Integrated management tools

Figure 3: Vendor comparison

Document managment

Desktop & mobile video

Unified messaging

Enterprise telephony

Contact centre

Room video conferencingIM

A/V/W conferencingSocialEmail

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Weakness• Complex partner network

for infrastructure

• IP telephony feature sets

• Interoperability

• Adherence to standards

• Desktop centric offering

4.1. MicrosoftMicrosoft’s offer to the unified communications market is led by their flagship product, Microsoft Lync. Microsoft Lync Server 2013, is the current iteration of the product. It was originally released as Microsoft Office Live Communications Server in December 2003 and primarily acted as a presence and instant messaging platform. It has been enhanced via acquisitions such as Mind Align (to provide features such as persistent chat), and the well-publicised acquisition of Skype.

Similar to the challenges Cisco had in the early 2000s with IP telephony, Microsoft still has an incumbency hurdle to overcome in order to move into a dominant market position. However, Microsoft can still benefit from their own incumbency in customer accounts (from a desktop and server OS perspective, as well as the wider use of their productivity applications).

Microsoft Lync acts as a tool to manage communications sessions and brings together Microsoft products to deliver a rich user experience. Subsequently, Microsoft Exchange; Windows (desktop and server), Office, SharePoint, and Yammer are considered core to the Microsoft unified communications experience. Microsoft has been criticised by clients for delivering a desktop-centric proposition in a world where the majority

of Internet traffic is now mobile. However, Microsoft has made significant investments to provide mobile apps for Apple and Android smartphones. Microsoft Lync has a heavy reliance on third parties to provide key hardware components for a Lync solution; working with partners such as Sonus on gateways and survivable branch appliances, and Polycom for voice and videoconferencing integration, for example. This approach can be seen as both a strength and weakness, as it provides architectural choice to clients, but in some instances relies on partners who do not necessarily have the maturity or coverage to be deployed and supported globally. In addition, this model pushes the challenge and the cost of interoperability onto the customer, rather than the manufacturer. Organisations with a larger geographic footprint should evaluate their geographic requirements against any recommended third-party components.

Microsoft has also been criticised for their adherence to standards, and their approach to interoperability. The usage of proprietary codecs and signalling protocols is common with many vendors, but Microsoft has made recent changes to application programming interfaces (APIs) and connections to third-party instant messaging networks, which should be factored into organisations risk models.

Microsoft’s offer in the social and workflow area is a particular strength; with the near-viral adoption of Yammer by employees in some organisations an example of shadow IT. Yammer, SharePoint, and Lync combine to provide a market-leading user experience, despite the relative immaturity of enterprise social networking in the market.

Organisations appear to choose Microsoft Lync due to the power of its desktop integration and the licensing structure. These factors make it an ideal commercial choice for clients with existing Microsoft investments (particularly enterprise agreements), who require tight integration at both the user and management layer. A strong internal skillset in Microsoft technologies is often a leading indicator for adoption of Lync, as skills in Exchange and SQL Server are key to large deployments. However, clients should assess the impact of the cultural and skill set changes required for a successful adoption of Microsoft Lync for collaboration.

Gartner is positive towards the Microsoft vision, but aligns the solution towards organisations with a Microsoft-focused IT strategy. They highlight the importance of the Skype acquisition to the development of Lync, and the value of the migration approach. However Lync Enterprise Voice is still a relatively new voice solution, with many enterprises still apprehensive about replacing their private branch exchanges (PBXs). It can also result in vendor lock-in.

‘ Enterprises that wish to align closely with the Microsoft Office product family should consider the Lync solution and understand how it might change their business processes and worker productivity.’

– Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2013

Figure 4: Dimension Data’s analysis of Microsoft Lync

Strength• Workspace licensing model

• IM and Presence

• Desktop collaboration experience

• Unified messaging

• Document management and workflow

• Social (Skype and Yammer)

• Virtualisation support

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4.2 CiscoCisco has created a complete set of unified communications capabilities since their entrance into the IP telephony market following their acquisition of Selsius in 1998. Cisco Unified Communications Manager provides the core capabilities, delivered via a small number of different soft clients, held under the ‘Jabber’ brand. Unified messaging is delivered via Cisco Unity, while WebEx provides audio and web conferencing. Additionally, Cisco has its own suite of videoconferencing products - from desktop and meeting room through to dedicated immersive studios – all of which are termed ‘TelePresence’. Until recently, Cisco took to market WebEx Social, which provided enterprise-focused social networking tools. However, on the 1 May 2014, Cisco announced that in future they would partner with Jive software, and removed their own solution from the market.

Cisco approach unified communications as a network service, and deliver an architecture, which extends service capabilities to users inside, and externally to the enterprise. This approach provides many benefits to clients looking to deliver an optimised infrastructure to multiple geographic locations, with a single vendor to simplify operations and management. Critics of this model claim it creates a risk of vendor lock-in, and highlight examples where Cisco has developed proprietary

standards that hamper interoperability. Cisco however has made significant investments to counter this claim (with Jabber guest) and now demonstrate integration with competitors such as Polycom and also Microsoft, with their Unified Computing System platform, which supports Microsoft tools.

Cisco has recently made significant changes to their licensing offer, in order to address market concerns about complexity, and now package key workspace capabilities together into Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs), to simplify purchasing. Although well received, the customer and partner community are still adapting to this change.

The key strength of the Cisco proposition is based upon the traditional capabilities of IP telephony and videoconferencing. Cisco provides a comprehensive desktop, mobile, and room-based video capability, and an IP telephony feature set that compares favourability with traditional PBX vendors. Their contact centre capability is a key differentiator from Microsoft Lync, providing a native capability that integrates with the video offerings. These capabilities are vital for clients for whom customer contact is key, or for a workforce or business process that may not embrace modern methods of working.

Organisations who choose Cisco tend to have heavy historical investments in Cisco

technology, are looking for a combined network, voice, and video stack, or see communications through a network lens. These prior investments create a strong commercial driver to remain with a vendor, and matched with internal skills sets and user experience creates a compelling business case. However, one large multinational financial services customer told Dimension Data that they selected Cisco, purely to balance their investments away from Microsoft and mitigate the risk of single vendor dominating spend and architectures.

Gartner is positive towards the Cisco product set, highlighting the ease of global deployment and support, management tools, and the full mobile device offering with Jabber. Gartner does express concern that the single vendor model is limiting networking choices, that licensing terms are not ideal, and at the continuing complexity of the architectural model.

‘ Evaluate the Cisco UC solutions when you are committed to using a comprehensive networking solution that includes the UCC suite. Cisco is also attractive for large and multinational corporations requiring strong voice and video capabilities, as well as for firms that require full UC client support on leading mobile platforms.’


Figure 5: Dimension Data’s analysis of Cisco Unified Communications

Weakness• Complex licensing

• Document management and workflow

• Interoperability

• Limited virtualisation options


• Network centric offering

Strength• Core UC – IP Telephony,

unified messaging, video

• Conferencing (web and audio)

• Contact centre capabilities

• Single vendor offering

• Published reference architecture

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4.3 AvayaAvaya brings a wide range of UCC capabilities to market using their Aura architecture, and have a long heritage as an original provider of PBX and networking hardware. The core of their offering is a session management platform, which brings together IP telephony (Avaya Aura Communication Manager), desktop, room based, and mobile video (Scopia). In addition, it offers audio and web conferencing (Aura Conferencing), and three distinct contact centre solutions (Avaya Aura Call Centre Elite, Aura Contact Centre, and Avaya Interaction Centre).

Avaya maintains product offerings following their Nortel Enterprise Solutions and Radvision acquisitions, which creates a degree of portfolio duplication and roadmap confusion. Avaya has made public their product roadmaps, highlighting a staged migration programme, which will allow existing clients to migrate at their own pace, leveraging existing investments. The effort to continue to support heritage customer investments with upgrades and migration options, provides clients with the security that their existing investments will be supported, but has allowed more recent and dynamic competitors to take a lead in feature sets or user experience. The size of Avaya’s portfolio has allowed it to complete

effectively across verticals, and particularly in smaller organisations with their IP Office line of products, while numerous acquisitions have provided a significant install base to upgrade and migrate.

Avaya positions several UCC clients (One-X, Scopia, and Flare) for users depending on use case, architectural heritage, or licensing model. Each product provides benefits for particular use cases, and matches the competitors feature sets, but the absence of uniformity across platforms can hamper user adoption.

Avaya’s core strength lies in its contact centre portfolio, which provides a full suite of capabilities. These ensure that organisations can deliver complex customer contact strategies using systems integration partners to extend and enhance the core offering.

Avaya appears to have one of the most open and interoperable solutions on the market. The Avaya Aura Session Manager provides a basis for clients to bring together disparate telephony platforms, while the Radvision acquisition provides significant video interoperability. Avaya also makes available a series of web service APIs, which enables the integration of communications services to business applications. This forms the core of their first to market Communications Enabled

Business Processes (CEBP) proposition. However, most organisations lack the in-house skills to leverage these capabilities.

Avaya benefits from a global footprint and channel partners, which enable larger clients to deploy across geographies, but these are few in number. Avaya, like Microsoft, relies upon their partners to bring together supplementary feature sets, for example social and document management systems.

Clients who purchase Avaya solutions tend to be larger organisations with complex historical investments, which require integration and for whom customer contact (call centre) is key to their operations. Smaller organisations also choose Avaya for the integrated capabilities, which deliver unified communications capabilities without complex deployments.

Gartner recognise Avaya’s strength in contact centre and IP telephony, and recognises the advances it has made in virtualising its offerings and delivering cloud capabilities. It makes particular note of Avaya’s multi-vendor capability and interoperability with Microsoft Lync. Gartner expresses concern that Avaya needs to consolidate its unified communications clients, and provide stronger mobile capabilities.

Figure 6: Dimension Data’s analysis of Avaya Unified Communications

‘ Consider Avaya Aura if you need to bring together heterogeneous environments (systems, services and devices) or have significant investments in Avaya that you wish to migrate toward a next generation UC solution.’


Weakness• Conflicting and multiple

collaboration tools in portfolio

• Licensing model

• Partners required for some UC capabilities

• Communications-centric offering

Strength• Telephony heritage

• Contact centre

• Virtualisation support


• Scale and reliability

• CEBP capabilities

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5. How can Dimension Data help?

Dimension Data’s experience in deploying unified communication projects across multiple industries and geographies, has given us valuable insight into the challenges, best practices, and technologies associated with choosing a solution.

Dimension Data can help organisations build their overall unified communications strategy using Dimension Data’s flagship Unified Communications and Collaboration Development Model (UCCDM). The UCCDM assessment guides organisations through the critical reflection points of a unified communications development. It maps out the client’s current state and describes the desired future state, and provides a development path to achieve the organisation’s objectives.

Usage and adoption is key to the success of unified communications, and goes beyond the typical training programme associated with a deployment. Dimension Data offers a comprehensive usage and adoption programme, which has helped clients drive increased utilisation of their UCC environment.

Finally, Dimension Data provides a full suite of deployment, support and managed services, including a comprehensive capability across Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft, to deliver on-premise, hybrid, public, and private cloud solutions.

If you have any further questions, or wish to speak to one of our representatives, please contact one of our offices at dimensiondata.com.

CS / DDNS-1182 / 06/14 © Copyright Dimension Data 2014

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how to choose your unified communication and collaboration platform vendor · 2014-11-18 · best...

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