Unified Communications (UC) empower end-users with rich and effective collaboration capabilities such as chat, voice, data sharing, and video. It has the potential to directly impact productivity and enhance business processes by streamlining how people communicate with each other. Due to its ability to enable virtual collaboration (mobile and remote workforce), Unified Communications also helps organizations improve customer service and reduce operating costs significantly.

“This world of collaboration has evolved a lot in the last decade and it continues to change rapidly. It has witnessed a transition from the era of PBX only deployments to the era of converged Digital Engagement Hubs like Microsoft Teams, Slack, WebEx Teams, etc.”

Visual collaboration and virtual meeting room experience are increasingly becoming the new norm as the workforce evolves prioritizing on mobility and flexibility for internal employees and external customers, who can now collaborate instantly irrespective of their locations. However, it turns infrastructure into a hybrid (complex) one to connect an analog and IP-PBXs platform to the cloud-based collaboration platforms.

As it directly impacts an employee’s productivity, maintenance of such infrastructure becomes an extremely sensitive affair. We, at HCLTech, work with several customers to assess their existing state of operations in order to bring in innovations in the space. The outcome of these assessments highlights the following challenges that an enterprise usually faces:

We have above 4000 unified communications specialists providing managed services to more than 250 customers, using a strong time-tested governance model. As the collaboration space evolves with more hybrid and cloud deployments, there is a need to manage the infrastructure differently using an alternative operating model.

Rendezvous, an in-house product of HCLTech, lies at the center stage of this re-imagined operating model to manage UC infrastructure. Rendezvous helps in digitization by turning the operations into a digital one by fixing challenges of a traditional operation with the help of its four major modules:

• Discover – The single pane of glass dashboard of Rendezvous provides an enterprise view that can be drilled down at a location, department, tenant, user or device level to understand usage pattern, traffic utilization, health and availability of the voice infrastructure.
• Monitor – Rendezvous enables enhanced monitoring of the UC infrastructure with the ability to monitor some of the key parameters such as examining in-progress calls, synthetic traffic generation, inspecting infrastructure health, and real-time media analysis.
• Automate – Rendezvous performs automation in four major categories: provisioning, service request, self-heal, and migration. The rich set of APIs allows Rendezvous to establish a co-relation with orchestrators to onboard increased number of AI Ops related use cases.
• ChatOps – Rendezvous allows use of the chat clients during troubleshooting to facilitate an effective form of collaboration with stakeholders. Defined workflows invoke a chat client like Microsoft Teams or WebEx teams to create a chat space for the team members to chat, call or initiate a video for effective troubleshooting.

Rendezvous integrates with most of the ITSM tools, so that, it automatically raises a ticket when an issue is identified during proactive monitoring. It also has self-healing capabilities. Let’s say a user has a call quality issue. Rendezvous can identify this issue in real time and work with an orchestrator to auto resolve the issue. May be, by configuring missing QoS on a router. It can also go about updating the tickets per troubleshooting progress.

#Rendezvous enables agile discovery, intelligent monitoring and #AI empowered automation keeping #ChatOps at the center stage.

In addition to that, it also supports cloud monitoring of today’s workstream digitization platforms like Microsoft teams or WebEx Teams. What makes it even more relevant is the fact that it is vendor independent.

An enterprise can leverage the following benefits from Rendezvous powered operating model:

1. Stability & Reliability: Ensures stability and reliability across UCC and VCC platforms to meet the ever-increasing expectations of the workforce.
2. Quality Assurance: Secures increased satisfaction in the overall IT quality assurance & operational efficiency through an automation-driven operating model.
3. Proactive Problem Management: Diagnoses a problem with the help of synthetic agents before it hits your production environment.
4. Master the Art of Monitoring: Quit wasting time by working with multiple tools & dashboards, adopt a seamless end-to-end monitoring tool that correlates across your entire UC/UCaaS ecosystem to protect business benefits for the organization.
5. Frictionless Troubleshooting: Troubleshooting involving multi-vendor platforms becomes agile and swift.
6. Orchestration & Co-relation: Realize the potential of true automation through co-relation and orchestration.
7. Differentiate your value to the business: Ability to quantify the return of collaboration value in the organization for internal and external stakeholders through a single pane of visibility.

It is said, when solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.

Rendezvous empowers an enterprise to do that.