This is part 3 of our series, Choosing the Right Network Performance Tool. To learn more about managing the performance of your unified communications and collaboration (UCC) network, view our previous posts, Choosing the Right Network Performance Tool: Part 1 and Part 2.
Managing the performance of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) networks is increasingly a business “must have,”1 and the path to achieving stellar network performance is end-to-end network visibility. That means that monitoring the IT infrastructure alone is not enough – your UCC network performance depends on vendor-specific troubleshooting, testing and analytics tools. Here we will look at how to monitor your entire Mitel UCC network infrastructure, without maintaining multiple dashboards.
Take a tour of Mitel Performance Analytics > In most IT organizations, the appeal of the “all-in-one” approach is the efficiency of end-to-end monitoring from a single dashboard. How can you take advantage of Mitel’..

When we picture the business desk phone, an old fashioned image of a dated office with old technology can come to mind.
The latest desk phones couldn’t be further from this, offering features such as mobile integration, latest Bluetooth and USB connectivity and HD audio sound quality to name but a few.
In addition to this, the design and ergonomics of the desk phone has changed for the better as well. This is partly due to the “consumerization of IT” where the devices and technologies we use in the home start becoming essential requirements at the office.
Take the rapid adoption of the tablet in the home. Many households now reach for the tablet for basic computing needs rather than the PC or laptop. While the instant-on long battery life and attractive form factor play a part in the acceptance of tablets, the maturity of the touch screen is what really brings them to life.
Think back to when the first touch devices came out – early smartphones, tablets and even PCs were hard to us..

In this video blog post, Tony Pereira explains how to leverage your prior communications investments. Tony discusses the different silos involved in modern day communications and how the cloud and APIs can enable business productivity.

Internet of Things: Use Cases > Internet of Things: Giving Machines a Voice >
From the Video: The old model of communications and collaboration really involves many many silos. So you’ve got the email silo, the calendar silo, the information silo, you know. And putting it all together – finding information in all the different silos – is actually quite time-consuming.
So that’s why you find a lot of people prefer not to collaborate much. They want to just stay in their own little silos
And it should be easy. It shouldn’t be complex. It shouldn’t be difficult.
There’s a lot of what I would call waiting for something to happen—waiting for information to come, waiting to go find the data.
You have to, you know, continuously regurgitate what you did a..

Avaya is ending support for its CS1000M platform in June 2018, and with the popularity of Nortel PBX units across a range of public sector organizations, this end of support is significant. An unsupported system creates service risks, and can have a serious impact on your team’s productivity and customer experience.
The CS1000 was widely implemented across the public sector, particularly within the healthcare industry. What does the end of support mean for the public institutions that are running on this system?
Replacement needs to happen quickly On top of the known end of support, public institutions are also facing uncertainty after Avaya’s announcement of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. With end of support looming in 2018, organizations need to be making steps today to ensure there is no failure of coverage during the transition.
What to look for Replacing an on-premises system like Avaya’s CS1000 will take a significant amount of effort. The platform you choose to replace you..

The Internet of Things has made it possible for businesses to automate tasks across machines, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. To get a more responsive customer experience, the next step in IoT will be joining the automation benefits of IoT infrastructure with the ease of accessibility of unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools.
This webinar, cohosted with IHS Markit, will take a look at how giving machines a voice by integrating IoT systems with UC can leverage investments you’ve already made and will work through a few use cases for how this digital transformation can enhance any industry.
Register today for this free live webinar > Marrying IoT and UC
Date: Thursday, July 13, 2017
Time: 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 15:00 UTC
Duration: 45 min + Q&A
Who Should Attend Enterprise IT and network professionals (director-level and above, C-suite executives, etc.) in the manufacturing, transportation, hospitality, and education verticals who want to learn more..

Well-managed networks perform reliably, delivering a great user experience. The right performance monitoring tool is the difference between a UC network that delivers poor quality calls, and one in which problems are detected and resolved quickly, often before the user is impacted. Since problems on voice networks are usually caused by an event in the IT infrastructure outside the communications solution, it might seem as if an off-the-shelf network monitoring tool is sufficient. However, to achieve a higher standard of performance monitoring, you need more than a surface-level tool.
The “All in One” Approach Explained Most network monitoring software options provide Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-based, end-to-end IT infrastructure monitoring, delivering detailed performance metrics on everything from servers to switches and VMWare. Taking this “all in one” approach to network management has its benefits: monitoring from a single dashboard certainly improves efficiency.
T..

Managing the performance of unified communications (UC) networks is increasingly a business “must have.”1 By shifting the support model from reactive to proactive, UC management software improves the user experience and ensures problems are resolved faster. In this series, we’ll define stellar UC network performance management outcomes, consider competing software options and offer approaches based on expertise developed managing more than 10,000 devices in Mitel networks around the world.
Network Performance: The Good and the Bad Voice traffic is more sensitive to issues in the network infrastructure than data, and problems can be more difficult to diagnose. Consider a school district in the Eastern United States that was plagued by a voice quality problem for six months. Users experienced persistent call quality problems, including echo and choppy audio. The school district’s channel partner tried to emulate the problem with test calls and investigate the performance of the Mitel so..

In this video blog post, Terry McCabe, CTO of Mobile Enterprise, explains why public cloud makes sense for growing businesses. Be sure to check out our companion post for when hybrid cloud makes sense for businesses, The Case for Hybrid Cloud.

From the Video We see lots of activity today, especially for small and medium businesses where public cloud is a very viable solution. It's fast moving and dynamic and it uses the ubiquitous access to the internet to deliver connectivity and to enable cost-effective services.
Now, for them cloud is transformative for their business. They don't necessarily have a premise, they certainly don't have an IT department that's going to maintain something. Cloud gives them the ability to get up and running quickly, to deploy new services quickly and easily, and as they expand their business to reach out to the employee base wherever they are using whatever internet connectivity is available or using mobile connectivity where that&#0..

The customer experience (CX) is changing, and the use of digital services is rising astronomically. As a result of this changing experience, businesses must position themselves to offer customers an outstanding CX or risk losing their businesses. To offer your customers the best experience, keep these points in mind:
Increasingly, a customer’s interaction with a business occurs via digital media. Text, web chat, and social media are the growing interaction channels. Social media usage is on the rise. Even people over 65 years old report that 10 percent of their communications is via social channels. Dimension Data’s 2017 “Global Customer Experience Benchmarking” study reports that the use of mobile applications for CX has grown to become a top three choice for everyone under the age of 55. Even with digital channel use exploding, phone-based support remains crucial. Dimension Data reports for people over 35 years old, the phone remains the most preferred communications channel for ..

Once long ago, hotels, motels and other hospitality businesses occupied a fairly simple space in people’s lives—they were a place for guests to lay their heads away from home. But anyone who’s spent time in the hospitality industry in the last several years knows that the role of technology in hospitality businesses has drastically expanded.
In many cases, they’re becoming hubs of activity unto themselves. Most of this activity relies directly or indirectly on technology, making IT more important to hotel operations and the guest experience than ever before.
So we’re here to share ten of the top communication technology trends in hospitality today. Check them out. Think about which ones make sense for your business. And if you see an opportunity, you can get out in front and begin planning accordingly. After all, in hospitality, every advantage counts.
1. Mobile device as door key It’s fascinating that a function as simple as a door key could undergo so much evolution. But the tool ..