Nectar and Plantronics Partner to Develop Ear-to-Ear UC Diagnostics

Partnership will bring call quality diagnostics from network core to wireless headset

Nectar Services Corp., the leader in the development and deployment of proactive network monitoring and performance management software for the Unified Communications (UC) industry, today announced a joint development and strategic alliance agreement with Plantronics to build the industry’s first ear-to-ear (e2e) diagnostics solution. The goal of this partnership is to provide enterprises and their service providers with the ability to quickly troubleshoot call quality issues that may originate anywhere - from within the network all the way out to a user’s wireless headset. With this new capability, service providers and enterprises can resolve issues faster, ensure superior call quality across the network and improve customer service.

“Nectar and Plantronics are bringing two best-in-class communications solutions together to provide correlated diagnostics that present call-specific health statistics for wireless headsets,” said Christopher Thompson, vice president, Enterprise Product Marketing, Plantronics. “We'll show a proof-of-concept at Microsoft Ignite which we intend to commercialize later this year. Together, we hope to help organizations more accurately localize issues which can detract from great user experiences.”

“As business communications services continue to evolve, it is paramount that the quality of those services remains superior. The last thing any business wants is to lose a potential customer or sale because of jittery VoIP,” said Jon Arnold, principal analyst, J. Arnold & Associates. “Advanced diagnostic capabilities, like e2e, will enable the level of quality monitoring needed to ensure innovative UC services are delivered at premium performance.”

Gartner cited in its 2016 Market Guide for Unified Communications Monitoring that maintaining acute awareness of latency, jitter and packet loss in a pre-emptive manner is essential to achieving end-user acceptance and demand for UCM tools that aid in the diagnosis of issues. The Plantronics and Nectar platforms will work together to meet that demand by capturing Plantronics Manager Pro call quality statistics as reported through Plantronics Hub and automatically correlating them to Nectar Quality Session Records in the UC Diagnostics (UCD) module. By presenting the Plantronics data inside of the Nectar toolset, administrators will be able to more quickly identify factors that may be contributing to a poor user experience and then take action to resolve those call quality issues.

“We’re constantly innovating to find new ways to help organizations provide great user experiences across their UC platforms and we believe this partnership is the next step in advancing UC platform monitoring, reporting and diagnostics,” said Tom Tuttle, SVP UC strategies and global alliances, Nectar. “With the new e2e diagnostics, managed service providers and resellers will optimize communications services and enterprises will find the quality of their calls remains at an optimum level.”

Nectar will be exhibiting at booth 1949 at Microsoft Ignite, September 25-29, 2017, in Orlando, FL. Stop by to learn more about Nectar’s e2e diagnostics for Plantronics Manager Pro.