Unified Communications: Top 3 Things You Need To Know

I recently heard a client speak about his vision for creating a collaborative organization.   On his mind was surely more than just communications, but he understood the challenge of creating such an enterprise and also understood the benefits.  What separates the dreamers from the doers is that they know it will take a systematic approach to setup their company with the right infrastructure to support such a vision.  This particular client understood that better than most. 

If you want to move toward a connected enterprise you'll have some work to do.  We share our thoughts on three broad areas of focus: 

#1 - The Network:  You can't build up without a foundation.  You can't put together a serious UC effort without the right network in place.  This network must support voice, video and of course the rest of your critical business applications.  Want a connected global enterprise?  If so, then latency, jitter and packet loss will be constantly on your mind if you have failed to properly build a network to support your technology.  Don't lose sight of what matters in this regard, it is all about performance across the network. 



#2 - The Technology:  Your choices will seem limitless.  Will you build your own or buy as a service?  Will you adopt all of what UC has to offer or take small bites at a time?  People underestimate the power of a good UC deployment.  For example, what would a video call between two employees really do for your company?  Well for one, a lot of research supports the idea that people listen more intently when video is involved.  It also creates a more intimate communication, which can help foster good working relationships.  I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you can think of how video would offer other benefits to your company.  What used to be an expensive undertaking is much more affordable today, the only thing that stops organizations from creating a UC environment is will power, not money. 

#3 - The Culture:  Change is easy, everyone knows that.  If you've been in management or IT long enough I'm sure you can appreciate the heavy sarcasm of that statement.  We need to go on a bit of a tangent here and talk about the new role for IT.  "Do more with less" is a constant for IT, but that seems to be changing in our estimation.  The new role is not one of "hey, this is broken can you fix it?" It's not "listen, I found this software, can you get it up and running for my department in a couple of weeks?"  Ok, sure, those things still happen, but we're seeing a shift toward the realization that technology is an engine that makes a company go.  The smarter and more efficient that engine, the better its resources will be used.   IT is at the heart of that, and a good IT executive finds a way to not just deliver solutions internally but to be a part of crafting them.  Proactively sitting down with other departments or even going to the line-level to understand the user experience is both impressive internally but also quite helpful in making decisions.  We recommend that IT people be part of changing the culture in an organization and not just reacting to it.  UC is a great way to start because you can get a sense of how departments communicate and ask them to help you find the benefits of UC.  Chances are that the insights gained by your internal conversations will help you find the best source of technology. 

Jitter, Packet Loss & Latency

Let's start with a layman's understanding of what they are:

Packet Loss - A "packet" is simply a packet of data (bytes) that travels across a network.  Let's use a highway analogy to best explain this:  Imagine that you have highway where cars can travel from say Boston to New York.  Some cars will leave Boston and never make it to NY, and that can also happen to packets in your network.  Any good public highway official will want ALL cars to make it unharmed to the destination, and that is also true of network professionals who want their network to deliver 100% of all packets, which essentially means no loss whatsoever.   

Latency - Everyone understands bandwidth but latency is just as (if not more) important.  For example, would you rather have a 10 lane highway that has stop and go traffic every two miles?  Or would you rather have a two lane highway where you can go 80 mph all of the time?  Bandwidth is the number of lanes, but latency is how fast your packets can travel across the network.  If your network has too much latency, your data will travel slowly and your experience will be degraded.

Jitter - Jitter is a measurement of how consistent the latency is on the network.  For example, in the 10 lane highway analogy, if some cars make it from Boston to New York in just 3 hours, while others make it in 5, and yet others in 10, then you would have an inconsistent delivery time of those cars.  The same is true for packets and in an ideal world, all packets traverse the network at the same speed and arrive at the same rate.  The rate of variance of this timing is calculated as jitter. 

So why do these things matter?  Well for starters, a great deal of what we do everyday at work is contingent upon a few basic things:
 
1) We need software applications to run smoothly and respond quickly to our commands
2) We need access to our files quickly and with ease
3) We need to be able to communicate through either a clear sounding phone call, or for the more advanced among us, an immersive unified communications experience that includes video. 
4) The longer it takes us to perform tasks that require computing or communication, the harder it is for us to get our work done. As a result, our productivity, and consequently our company's profits, suffer for it.   

Information technology and communication tools are almost hygienic in nature, we simply require them to do the grander work that our jobs compel us to do.  We only notice their absence when they aren't working properly for us. Packet loss, latency and jitter all impact those items listed above. 

So what can you do about it?  Easy, make sure you have a solid network with a service level agreement that commits to acceptable levels of packet loss, jitter and latency that are within the tolerance level of the applications and communication tools you're using or plan to deploy.

But how do you make sure that you have the right network?  This one should be so obvious we are almost afraid to answer it, but of course not wanting to miss a chance for shameless self-promotion we can't pass it up:  Call Stellis Technology Advisors, we can help.