The world is changing more quickly every year. Whether it is climate change, medical advancements, social values, or new AI capabilities.
And Enterprise communications are changing just as quickly as businesses strive to keep up with the fast-paced world.
Enterprise communications includes the tools employees use to communicate (unified communications and collaboration) and the tools that help customers connect to your organization (contact center tools).
Regardless of whether you choose an enterprise communication solution from Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, RingCentral or combine capabilities from multiple vendors, both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) will be negatively impacted by performance, reliability, or quality failures.
Increasingly enterprise communication solutions are moving to the cloud and providing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) or contact center as a service (CCaaS), often seeking to combine both, as an extensible communication platform.
As these communication platforms seek to deploy features more quickly, development methodologies have evolved to keep up.
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are intended to work together to get new features and functionality rapidly to end users.
With CI, developers on a team frequently commit changes to a shared repository. A continuous integration pipeline can automatically run builds, run unit tests, and even conduct automated code reviews. The idea is to prevent difficult code mergers and deep-seated bugs that can occur when developers work in isolation for an extended period.
CD automates testing, configuration, and deployment from build into the production environment.
CI/CD has greatly improved the speed and number of features released for all leading enterprise communication platforms.
Case in point, at recent Inspire conference, Microsoft highlighted they had introduced over 670 new capabilities for Teams in the past 12 months. This compares to the over 400 capabilities released in the previous year. The pace of feature releases is increasing.
Of course, this trend is not unique to Microsoft.
The CI /CD Blind Spot
CI/CD provides an excellent methodology to trigger automatic unit, feature, and regression tests for an application when a change is made to your code.
However, if you create a software or hardware product that integrates with a variety of other products, you do not know when changes are made to these products that may negatively impact the functionality of your product. This is the CI/CD blind spot.
In the world of enterprise communications, the depth of breadth of integrations is increasing, thus the size of vendor blind spots is also increasing.
Product creators can seek to avoid this blind spot by triggering regression testing not only when their product changes but also when any of the core platforms or devices they integrate with are modified. This will likely require expanding your testing lab and tasking your testing team to track version and patch updates across a wider range of third-party products.
One Company Stepping Up to the Plate
I recently had the opportunity to discuss these specific challenges with Chakra Devalla, CEO of TekVizion.
TekVizion has a long history as the authorized devices and software test facility for the leading enterprise communication platforms: Microsoft, Cisco, Google, RingCentral, Zoom, Mitel, Genesys.
After providing interoperability validation for years, TekVizion has developed a certification lab with hundreds of configurations. TekVizion has also built a team of interoperability experts that have over twenty years experience working with the key platform providers.
However, as noted above, with increasing integration, to ensure reliable service delivery a more dynamic approach to testing is often required. As Chakra explained “continuous change requires continuous testing”.
Continuous Testing for Continuous Change
To help deal with the challenge of continuous change, tekVizion has augmented its interoperability testing lab with a growing set of automated testing tools. TekVizion calls this TekVizion 360 and Chakra explained that this service is offered as a subscription, providing access to the multivendor lab, the integration experts, and their proprietary automation tools.
A subscription service is required because testing needs to be done continuously, unlike in the past where once you met all the requirements in the lab you could deploy the solution worry-free for a long period of time.
TekVizion uses robotic process automation to test the end-to-end functionality of your solution on a regular basis, ensuring that your service continues to deliver functionality, quality, and performance even when other integrated pieces change.
This means that bots, not people, are executing real-time transactions 24×7 and monitoring the results.
You end up with a dashboard that shows exactly how your device or application is performing.
The world of enterprise communications is changing more quickly, and increasing integrations are increasing overall solution complexity. In this environment, vendors wanting to provide superior customer value may need to expand their testing methodology to include capabilities such as those provided by TekVizion.
While change is always difficult, tekVizion claims that customers can reduce their testing costs by 50% or more when they switch to TekVizion. This would certainly make the change a little easier.
