Today’s Unified Communications (UC) solutions are all about software; increasingly virtualized and with their head in the cloud, but still with at least one foot firmly planted on premise.

Whether cloud or premise based (or fashionably hybrid), as with all software applications the delivery cycle of a new UC product has changed significantly in the last decade, from monolithic updates arriving every 2 years to a stream of agile, continuous and incremental improvement.

What hasn’t changed is the need to interact with other vendors’ products or telco services to collectively deliver a compelling solution to the customer.

In effect, the development time and the window for recovering your R&D investment has nearly halved, while the complexity of integrating 3rd party products has probably doubled.

The cost of maintaining your own ecosystem of 3rd party solutions to ensure coexistence can throttle new development and delay market entry and time-to-revenue.

The Problem

In today’s environment, testing and solution integration is delayed by test bed setup, product acquisition, training and support. Your team has to purchase multiple vendor solutions, wait 30 days to receive the equipment, and another 4 weeks to setup and start integration. Your agile development model may get you a new UC or contact center feature set in 2 weeks, but how long does it take to get it tested with all the other elements of the whole solution such as Service Provider SIP trunking or 3rd party PBXs?

Unless you are a mega telco on a global or national scale, the chances are that the team you ask to do this is NOT a dedicated test team, and is more likely to consist of hard pressed presales engineers and specialists and even businesses with dedicated teams and processes still find themselves struggling to cover all the bases in a fast moving and populous UC ecosystem.

The other challenge in maintaining your product ecosystem is version management. As your partner vendors release new versions, the upkeep of 3rd party products can derail your solution with development and field integration problems.

In our experience the best solution is a timeshared virtual ecosystem, allowing you to connect anytime from anywhere to experiment with concepts, test your ideas and prove their value without incurring the cost of building the entire ecosystem.

You need more than just Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is typically a barebones system provided to you from the cloud, leaving you to install the virtualized 3rd party products and configure them as needed.

The challenge with this option is you still incur the cost of 3rd party software acquisition and need the skills to configure and maintain it. While IaaS lets you install your application flexibly and securely in the cloud, it does not reduce the cost or the time required to complement your UC solution’s agile development and product introduction.

tekVizion onTAP

tekVizion onTAP is a purpose built platform of multiple vendor UC products for on-demand access from anywhere. Commonly deployed UC topologies are preconfigured and setup for end users to simply schedule and start using with the click of a button.

onTAP maintains up to date releases of its target platforms, so your engineering and field support teams have access to the latest and greatest product versions all the time.

onTAP offers you the infrastructure, 3rd party software and the system knowledge to configure and maintain solutions without acquiring skills that are not required for your core product.

onTAP reduces the time and the cost it takes to start working with any 3rd party UC solution.  onTAP reduces time-to-market and time-to-revenue, even before you consider the associated lab maintenance costs, making onTAP a compelling solution, whether for a one off proof of concept or as the foundation for your continued UC interoperability programs.

For more information go to https://www.tekvizion.com/services/ontap/.