Dimension Data's Secret Sauce - Blending UC with IT

Dimension Data has been a champion and a leader in unified communications and collaboration (UCC) space for a number of years. Our post in January 2012, "The Channel: Key to UC and Gaining Traction," highlighted their success within the UCC market.

In 2012, Dimension Data continued to build on their industry-leading unified communications and collaboration deployment model.

The Dimension Data Communications Business Unit (the "Group") continues to thrive in UCC by partnering with leading global vendors in the market, including both Cisco and Microsoft, that offer distinctly different approaches to UCC. Dimension Data offers their clients the choice between these approaches and also offers a mix of the two models, focusing on the best product set for each client's requirements, including elements from a range of other vendor partners.

We recently talked to Jaskarn Randhawa, Senior Services Product Manager for Dimension Data's Communications Business Unit about the Group's emphasis on managed services for UCC in 2014.

Dimension Data believes that organizations have three major challenges with designing and managing UCC environments:

1. Initial design of an effective solution, with solid justification and with low total cost of ownership.
   
   
2. Lifecycle management of the UCC system and software.
   
   
3. User adoption of the new UCC applications and workflows, to deliver the justification promise.

Dimension Data's Managed Services for UCC (MSUCC) address these challenges in several ways, in combination with Dimension Data's cloud hosting options and with Dimension Data's professional services for solution design.

This begins with a solid foundation based on ITIL practices. ITIL is widely recognized and used by our UniComm Consulting clients, and Dimension Data sees ITIL as the best framework to follow for successful service management. ITIL helps Dimension Data work with their clients to set a baseline against which to measure the managed services performance, at any stage of the solution lifecycle.

Dimension Data then organizes their Managed Services into two categories:

• Service assurance - This focuses on proactive fault management through the rapid characterization and analysis of service-impacting events, incidents and problems. Typically Dimension Data clients are also looking to have complete and accurate visibility of their installed asset base (serial numbers, software release numbers and so forth). Most enterprises would describe this category of managed services as the outsourcing of system reliability and break-fix management.
  
  
• Service fulfilment - This focuses on the more complex service challenges of how to deliver change management to assure UCC adoption. The operational aspects of service fulfilment are usually interlocked with each client's operations management structure. The scope ranges from end-user support, to software lifecycle management of patch deployments and major upgrades, to help desk operations. UCC software lifecycle management is typically one of the most frequently requested services by Dimension Data's clients. Since the Dimension Data team is fully certified with all major vendors' software products, they can analyse, select, recommend and then manage the client's collaboration estate and growth requirements.

It's also important, from my view, that Dimension Data's UCC solutions integration and managed services practices are not stuck in the historical silos of telecom or even of email. UCC is an integration of communications into the roles, workflows and business processes of an enterprise, so as to reap the benefits of business improvements enabled by this new wave of technology. This will require that UCC technologies live side-by-side and are integrated with the business application software and procedures of an enterprise.

UCC will be sharing the same server farms (on-premises or cloud-based), the same networks, the same user devices, and increasingly the same user interface as the business applications. A managed services program that uses ITIL methodologies to provide UCC seamlessly in this blended environment is key. In fact, deploying, managing, and assuring adoption of UCC in the IT technology model, rather than the traditional telecom silo model, will likely be the "secret sauce" for Dimension Data's success with UCC.

It was clear, from the interview with Jaskarn, that Dimension Data has a modern approach and is growing their UCC business. We wish them success, since it will certainly add to the growth and maturity of our industry.

This paper is sponsored by Dimension Data.