The demands placed on companies adjusting to remote work collaboration and other impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated for global operators. Fortune 100 corporations already had to navigate the complicated hurdles of international logistics before the virus began to spread in late 2019, and a year with outbreaks of varying degrees across continents has added even more uncertainty.
Now top executive teams dispersed across oceans and time zones have to meet virtually, which makes it absolutely crucial for IT resources to function properly and for large IT projects to be executed as effectively as possible to support thousands of new employees needing remote work collaboration capabilities. Those needs, along with managing an expected boom in video endpoint usage in reconfigured offices, are among the services provides worldwide by EOS IT Solutions with heavy reliance on Vyopta to help clients monitor the performance of their unified collaboration systems worldwide.
During a recent webinar Tim Shockley, vice president of sales for EOS, said the number variables in play with remote workers make Vyopta important to have as a tool because clients can more easily determine the cause of a bad call or video meeting. Whether it be a faulty headset, poor bandwidth at home or an executive without the firmest knowledge of how to use audiovisual equipment, EOS is able to troubleshoot more quickly and keep meetings and collaboration sessions productive.
“These are (executives) that are often not technical, and these devices need to be set up in this way in their home. They might need somebody to come into their home to set it up a lot of the time,” he said.
“There’s employees that work just fine off their laptop, but they need headsets and so forth… and then you have other companies where we need 20,000 webcams and headsets. The point being logistics, high quantities of need at various levels and tiers is what’s changed a lot during Covid-19.”
Big IT Projects Demand The Best Data
Shockley said the pandemic many caused large companies to hit the pause button on at least some of their large IT projects slated for 2020, because of a combination of increased logistical challenges and the likelihood that demands in the workplace will change significantly. The gradual opening back up of major economies hit hard by the virus means that many of the delayed projects as well as those scheduled for 2021 will have to move forward with new plans and structures.
Accommodating the socially distanced workplace with video endpoints and staggered in-office schedules means remote work collaboration technology will be more important than ever.
Jonathan Sass, Vyopta’s head of product management, said the dramatic expansion of UC needs in companies of all sizes makes it important to have fast, accurate data on usage – for collaboration tools as well as hardware such as video endpoints – so they can adapt their plans based on how workers are using what’s available. That knowledge helps prevent unnecessary spending for hardware and software, and improve productivity by making sure workers are able to confer over video without chronic quality issues.
“The Vyopta platform is able to give key analytics around a number of different metrics, including the adoption of different technologies, the utilization of hardware, endpoints, rooms. This data can be used to look at, you know, where do we need to expand? What technologies do we need to invest more in?” he said.
“We can help you look at what technologies are working best, and what’s the cost of ownership of those techniques help to provide data so you can see the cost of ownership of those technologies, license utilization, a bunch of things to optimize your UC investments. Then you can apply those optimizations that you may see in a particular region and take them globally across the organization by leveraging the data that we provide.”
Manage Multiple Vendors For Remote Collaboration
It’s important to note that the rich data Vyopta presents to clients is presented in a single-pane format, eliminating the need for UC administrators and IT teams to have to hunt in multiple locations inside admin centers for products from Microsoft, Cisco or Zoom. And with multivendor capabilities, Vyopta is built to serve organizations with an assortment of video and remote work collaboration tools in use across many offices and regions.
“More systems, more than 50 percent of organizations today are using two or more systems either on-premises or (unified communications as a service) providers and across those more locations, not only in the offices that may be managed by the IT department around the world, but also the home offices, which present a whole new set of challenges,” Sass said.
“We’ve been working with many global enterprises to help provide that single-pane-of-glass format to address not only the increased volume of collaboration that is going on in the usage of that technology, but also the increased complexity, giving the visibility not only into what’s going on in their network, but also what’s going on within some of those home offices, providing them deeper insights.”
