Too Many UCaaS Tools, Too Little Time

For nearly every enterprise, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is essential for business productivity, particularly with hybrid workforces. And with enterprises continuing to add new UCaaS platforms to meet the evolving needs of their businesses, UCaaS use is on the rise globally.

In fact, a recent report estimated the UCaaS market will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4 percent from 2023 to 2030. Of course, with this growth comes a dramatic increase in the number of tools needed to manage these services, creating tremendous complexity for enterprise IT organizations.

With so many tools in use, IT is under increased pressure to ensure the user experience is flawless enterprisewide. But let’s face it, learning 10 or more vendor point tools is a tall order—one that is unlikely to be successful. Compounding matters, this comes at a time when IT teams are shrinking and skills shortages are at an all-time high, further straining limited resources.

Juggling Too Many UCaaS Tools 

A recent NETSCOUT study on the use of UCaaS tools confirmed that many enterprises are steadily increasing the number of tools and applications used for communications and collaboration. The study found that 59 percent are supporting six or more UCaaS services. And 71 percent indicated that their organization had increased the number of UCaaS tools in the past year alone.

2020 - 40% Support 6+ Tools
2021 - 40% Support 6+ Tools
2022 - 29% Support 6+ Tools
Jan 2024 - 59% Support 6+

Last year’s survey found that companies were reducing tools, with only 29 percent using six or more UCaaS tools. But as of January 2024, tool usage was on the rise again, doubling to 59 percent. This represents the highest percentage since NETSCOUT began tracking such tool usage statistics. The reasons behind this trend are uncertain, but one thing is clear, IT has been left with an overwhelming number of tools, making it vastly more difficult to manage UCaaS problems and maintain high-quality end-user experiences.

Negative Impact on User Experience Has Widespread Implications

When it comes to UCaaS, the quality of the user experience is everything. Regardless of where employees are using these tools—at headquarters, factories, warehouses, retail locations, their homes, or contact centers—ensuring application health is vital to the success of the enterprise. For many companies, the more remote sites they have, the more UCaaS platforms are in use. This creates greater complexity and more of a challenge for IT when it comes to monitoring and troubleshooting.

The measure of how effective a UCaaS tool is for an enterprise can be found in the quality of the user experience. The NETSCOUT survey found that a majority (63 percent) of respondents indicated that user experience issues have a significant impact on the value of the UCaaS platform, and 33 percent stated user experience had some impact.

75% of companies with $10 billion+ in revenue say UX issues have a significant impact on UCaaS platform value.

74% of C-level executives say UX issues have a significant impact on UCaaS platform value.

The impact of UCaaS performance issues is often felt more dramatically by larger corporations. 75 percent of survey respondents in higher-revenue companies—those with more than $10 billion in revenue—felt that user experience issues had a significant impact on UCaaS platform value, while 74 percent of C-level executives agreed with this assessment.

The Need for Robust Monitoring and Management Practices

With so many different UCaaS tools being used by enterprises today, the need for robust monitoring and management practices to mitigate the risks associated with platform downtime has never been greater. Ensuring the best user experience is universally acknowledged as key to UCaaS success. The use of multiple platforms, from multiple vendors, with users all over the world—often in noncorporate locations—makes troubleshooting and protecting user experience challenging. For IT organizations wrestling with the quality of their user experience, NETSCOUT brings an independent vendor approach to managing performance.

By leveraging packet monitoring at scale, enterprises can gain deeper visibility into platform performance, proactively identify potential issues, and expedite resolution times for help desk tickets. They can also better respond to significant outages by pinpointing root causes more quickly, enhancing their operational resilience, and ultimately delivering a superior user experience for employees and customers.

Independent third-party monitoring of all UCaaS tools offers IT teams the most effective way to manage the complexity and quality issues they face, allowing them to deliver a flawless UCaaS experience for end users, which is vital to the business.

Learn more in our comprehensive report: “UCaaS and Today’s Enterprise: The True Cost of Outages and Help Desk Support”.