How to Deliver “Five Nines” Business Outcomes

Why Your Cisco UCC and UC Services Business Needs Automated Event Correlation

As a Cisco service provider, your customers pay you to deliver high-quality call center and unified communications services. Whether you are hosting their infrastructure in the cloud or providing managed services, availability isn’t negotiable. When a service degrades or goes down, you have to fix it right away. Otherwise, you’re putting your customer’s business at risk. Service quality is about providing five nines reliability for your customers – and it’s also about creating five nines outcomes for your service provider business.

However, here’s the thing. It isn’t easy to deliver high service availability and performance. In a perfect world, you would get a single, clear notification when a service is in trouble – just push the button and the issue is fixed. Unfortunately, the world is far from perfect – in fact, it’s incredibly complicated. That’s why customers come to you to manage their call center and unified communications infrastructure – otherwise, they would just push the button themselves.

Too Many Events, Too Little Time

So why is it so hard to keep these types of services up and running? More to the point – why does it take so long to restore services when they fail? The answer is remarkably straightforward. When a service fails, this generates thousands of events – making it next to impossible to pinpoint the underlying cause. Even worse, IT infrastructure generates huge numbers of events all of the time – even when services are working normally. This creates an overwhelming background noise, making it even harder to diagnose service issues.

Why are there so many events? It’s because of the domino effect. When one IT component has an issue, the symptoms cascade across the entire service infrastructure. For example, think about a storage failure. As soon as this happens, the databases that use this storage start to complain. Then the applications that use those databases start to complain as well. You end up with dominoes falling all over the place. Finding out which domino started the chain reaction is like finding a needle in a haystack.

And let’s be clear. There are lots of dominoes. Modern call center and unified communications technology is incredibly powerful – but it’s also very complicated. There are huge numbers of components – applications, SIP proxy servers, directories, voice gateways, multiservice switches, recording servers and more. Unless you understand all of these components and how they interact, there is no way to know which dominoes fell – and why. Even if you do understand, the sheer complexity is overwhelming.

What’s the result? Instead of quickly fixing service issues for your customers, you spend hours or even days figuring out what’s going on. Meanwhile, your customers are losing money. If you blow your SLAs, you’re losing money as well – either in penalties or through lost business down the road.

Automated Event Correlation Turns Hours into Seconds

That’s why automated event correlation is one of the most important investments you can make – both for your customers and for your business. With automated event correlation, you don’t waste valuable time manually tracking down the root cause of service issues. Instead, automated event correlation does it for you. It uses built-in intelligence to analyze huge amounts of incoming events, detecting patterns and relationships that point to the real problem. And it’s blazingly fast – pinpointing the root cause of call center and unified communications service issues in just seconds.

Let’s think about what that means for your customers – and your business. Here are just some of the ways that automated event correlation delivers five nines business outcomes:

• Reduced downtime and less business disruption

Service outages and degradations have a huge business impact on your customers – call center downtime can cost your customers more than $100,000 an hour in lost revenues. And that’s just the start – the long-term impact is equally serious. Automated event correlation dramatically accelerates service restoration – you spend your time actually fixing the problem rather than investigating it. In our experience at Optanix, this typically reduces MTTR by as much as 50%.

• Higher customer satisfaction and retention

Reduced service downtime translates directly into increased customer satisfaction. By delivering a positive customer experience, you increase customer retention and build trust. Not only does this protect your revenue streams, it also makes it much easier to upsell additional services to your existing customer base. And it also reduces pricing pressures – customers are less likely to look for lower-cost alternatives when they are highly satisfied with the services you deliver.

• Increased win rates

Better service quality is a key competitive differentiator, especially with prospects that rely on their mission-critical contact center and unified communications services. By adopting automated event correlation, you can build a reputation for delivering superior service availability – and can even back this up by offering more aggressive SLAs during the sales process. This translates into higher win rates – and even allows you to command a price premium. And, of course, you can also upsell enhanced SLAs to your existing customer base.

• Reduced service delivery costs

Manually diagnosing service issues is expensive. It takes skilled and experienced Cisco UCC and UC experts – and consumes vast amounts of their time. By automating event correlation, you can dramatically lower the cost of managing your customers’ contact center and unified communications infrastructure. Not only does this improve your margins, it also frees up your existing Cisco experts for high-value activities that drive additional revenues.

• Better business scalability

Skilled and experienced Cisco experts aren’t just expensive – they’re also difficult to find. This is a barrier to growing your sales – you can’t service new customers if you don’t have the capacity to deliver. On the other hand, automated event correlation scales simply by adding computing capacity. Yes, you still need Cisco experts, but automated event correlation maximizes their productivity.