Making the UC Management Decision

Important guidelines for on-premise or managed unified communications.

Even after you’ve found a suitable advisor and planned your unified communications (UC) deployment, there remains one critical decision before deployment can begin:

Will your business run the UC applications on-premise or via a remote managed service?

There is no right answer. One can’t say that large companies should do this while small companies should do the opposite, because other criteria, everything from in-house technical expertise to long-term business objectives, also come into play.

However, there are some guidelines that can help owners and managers reach an informed, effective decision on whether to run locally or remotely. The decision process starts with questioning the quantity of communications relative to the company’s size.

“People rarely outsource because of costs,” says Michael Smith, group director for collaboration solutions at Cisco. “Typically, they outsource when they don’t have the capacity to handle big loads, it’s not a core competency of theirs, or it’s something in which they don’t want to build a core competency.”

Provided that outside services are established with clear scope and goals, managed well, and that requirements for satisfactory service are agreed on and upheld, then managed services can save companies money. Even in fairly small deployments that can be run from a single server, there are still integration issues with legacy systems, software patching, security concerns, and all the rest. Everything costs, and the amount of outlay can vary widely from year to year and month to month. Outsourcing to a managed service provider (MSP) can bring stability and the predictability needed to make accurate financial forecasts.

There are also questions of motivation. In some cases, a company’s IT department may feel it’s already running at 110%. If the order comes down to add UC services on top of everything else, especially if IT perceives an insufficient expansion of resources to do an adequate job, then morale and the final outcome may suffer.

“As with any project, a ‘pro’ of outsourcing to a specialist partner is that this is what they do,” says Matthew Woodget, senior product manager for Microsoft Lync. “They have a vested interest in being on the top of their game and providing the best service to you as possible. And if they don’t, you can change partners.”

A major advantage of outside management is that the expense is less likely to be viewed as a cost center. Like any other IT project, UC can come under budget pressures, and cutbacks can prevent staff from getting the resources necessary to keep both adequate training and current equipment. An externally sourced project might be tied to a specific business initiative, such as growth or improving competitiveness, and thus receive more budgeting leeway.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading