Connecting your workforce through Unified Collaboration technology

A global airline. A provider of financial data and infrastructure. A global IT services company. What could they all possibly have in common? The answer: an urgent need for unified collaboration. In this article, Jeyavelan S., Head of Collaboration & Connected Solutions, India & MECAA at Tata Communications, explores how enterprises can connect their workforces through unified collaboration technology.

All of these entities have operations spread over different countries, and were struggling with siloed communication set-ups, a need for streamlined communication across all locations, and need for (preferably) a single solution or platform that would enable hybrid work, ensure business continuity, increase efficiency, and decrease costs.

The airline, for instance, was using multiple PBXs (Private Branch Exchanges) each serving its own region (country). It neither had the ability to provide an effective unified collaboration medium, nor to support work from home—an essential in these times of hybrid work. Furthermore, the separate communications systems being used not only led to wasted resources and duplication of work, but also meant work was being done in silos with no standardised communications across locations.

“The management realised the need for a single service provider that offered a unified and centralised cloud calling solution to streamline their communications across geographies.”

This solution needed to include voice calling, text messaging, virtual meetings, and voice mail.

The financial company was using multiple fragmented collaborative solutions and wanted to unify them into a single standard platform for a consistent user experience.

Here, the issues they faced included the difficulties of managing several carriers across geographies, requirement for stringent SLAs and governance support, and having to manage customised telephony-related processes. They had a pressing need for a unified communications architecture with built-in automation.

The IT services company was looking for solutions in four main areas:

• Consolidating telecom services being provided by multiple vendors by moving to a single provider that could cover all these services
• Support with migrating from legacy TDM (Time division multiplexing) infrastructure to SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and number portability
• Support with acquiring a geo-redundant architecture with assured high voice quality
• End-to-end, best-in-class services

These enterprises all chose a comprehensive suite of solutions from a top service provider, with the ability to address each of their requirements and more.  The airline, for example, chose an end-to-end solution that provided a Cloud Calling platform powered by Cisco Webex technology, managed services, access network and domestic/international PSTN globally. In addition to the IP Phones, the users were offered unified soft-clients for laptops and smartphones, which enabled them to avail messaging, space/room, calling, meeting, desktop and file sharing, and voice mail functionalities. The business impact was impressive:

• Effective, borderless communication and collaboration and ability to work from home ensured business continuity, boosted employee productivity and enhanced the airline’s operational efficiency.
• The centralised management and simplified platform reduced wastage of resources and effort duplication, allowing employees to focus on core business activities.
• The single provider set-up significantly reduced costs.
• The uptime of 99.99% ensured non-disruptive user experience
• And the global coverage meant that the airline’s upcoming plans to move its employees in US, Europe and APAC to cloud were also covered.

Using the same suite of solutions, the financial company received bundled service capabilities and integrated managed services for migration with complete transition support that included user training, end-to-end management and automation through a single partner. The single-pane-of-glass intelligent monitoring, analytics, advanced reporting and automation ensured reduced Mean Time to Restore due to auto diagnosis of incidents, dedicated governance and better visibility and control, continual improvement through daily/weekly tracker and raid log reviews. The client’s telephony costs reduced by 22% since it was paying for only what it used. Employees were able to work from anywhere without any issues.

Now let’s take a look at the IT company that was looking for solutions to a set of different issues being faced. It gained a single service provider that enabled it to port all phone numbers to cloud infrastructure and consolidate all PRIs (Primary Rate Interfaces) to SIP breakout on-cloud, a customer portal that enabled reporting, ordering, billing, ticketing and user management, and a centralised architecture, to 24x7x365 service support desk and 99.99% SLA to support business continuity.

“In today’s world of hybrid work, changing customer expectations and the need to be “always on”, the key to success is seamless communication and collaboration.”

As part of their digitalisation journey, enterprises are moving towards unified communications solutions on the cloud. This is a complex migration process while establishing the overall infrastructure and regulatory understanding to offer their services in highly regulated countries. Most companies do not have the in-house expertise to handle this complexity.

My clients have told me that the sheer geographical size and number of telecom circles, coupled with stringent telecom regulations, make India a complex market when it comes to Unified Communications (UC) deployments. And they look for a trusted advisor with experience and expertise as their UC partner. Tata Communications has worked with multiple Indian and global clients and helped improve their employee experience by streamlining their voice infrastructure or migrating seamlessly to a cloud collaboration suite.

Tata Communications GlobalRapide is a comprehensive platform that helps enterprises migrate efficiently from legacy systems to a single cloud-based platform, weaving in the cloud voice layer and managed services in a seamless manner. It standardises the user experience and manages multiple UCaaS products, consolidating carriers and vendors and having a geo-redundant architecture while ensuring high voice quality. Regional complexities are simplified with adherence to compliance and security requirements and hundreds of certified and experienced professionals who provide managed services for our clients as the first point of contact, thus fulfilling the integrated SLA that customers look for. All of this is underpinned by the Tier-1 voice infrastructure that Tata Communications provides in the cloud voice layer of Tata Communications GlobalRapide.

To learn more about how to elevate your employee experience in India through collaboration technology, click here.