Why Cloud Voice Migration Is About More Than Choosing a Platform

Hello and welcome to UC today. My name is Christopher Carey and today I'm joined by Vivek Kar, head of employee interaction suite at Tata Communications. We're going to be discussing why the real challenge of cloud voice migration begins after the platform decision. So Vivek uh thanks for joining me again. How are you? Hi Chris, doing well. Thank you for having me here. So diving right into it, I mean enterprises have spent years discussing the move to cloud communications. Why is the platform decision now only one part of the transformation challenge? So earlier the bigger challenge what we faced was the uh there were decisions were taken regionally right. So all the uh enterprises local units had local IT team which used to take care of the local nuances regulation uh what is the best solution which works for the local team and then as a bigger organization things just uh fell into place. Now the as the organizations are going global they want a unified experience. So they it's a central team which are taking decision. It's more of enablement of those unified platform as a standard experience which they want to provide. But then the challenge becomes what are the kind of equipments, what kind of devices, what kind of uh te telecom vendors who would enable those kind of services uh what kind of managed services are being available in a particular region versus the other geographies. So all those mix and matches make it more complicated because it's no longer just the application, right? It's the endpoints, it's the managed services, it's the integration of the meeting rooms, the devices, the uh different countries giving a unified experience uh uh being compliant to the regulation. So there are a lot of elements which comes into picture when you are managing it centrally. Yeah, it's a good point. And what do organizations most commonly underestimate when they begin a cloud voice or UC migration? So the biggest challenge becomes porting because uh they are used to a particular regulation for a particular country and as you move towards east the porting becomes a major issue. In certain countries porting is allowed certain country portings are not allowed. Then uh changing operator becomes a issue. Buildings are there are numbers which are located to a building or a society which cannot be broken down by the pure enterprises. So those kind of technicalities and issues keeps coming in. Uh whereas the central buying authority doesn't understand the complexity. They believe I have placed the order with operator and everything would be taken care of. But then uh porting becomes one of the biggest challenge which we uh uh see as a issue. And the secondly somebody like Tatacom who supports most of the major platforms the issue becomes in certain regions certain operators support a particular platform. So how do you get somebody to unified uh give you a unified experience across geography that becomes critical. H and why do so many enterprises still retain substantial legacy PBX infrastructure even as hybrid work and cloud collaboration become more established. So see first of all it's a cost factor right for not all use cases need a high-end UKcast solution uh a UKcast application uh license uh certain pure simple calling use cases where a traditional PRI or a PBX uh solution works right so it's a combination of solutions and that's where something like Tata communication or other uh full-fledged managed service provider comes in because they can mix and match different platform, different solution, different combination to meet the enterprises use case requirement, right? Without have to uh worry about how to manage a complex deployment. M even if you want to partially move to cloud. So for example if you want to move to teams but there are major use cases which still needs just PRI TA organization like Tata communication can give you a single platform to manage the entire UKcast ecosystem as well as the traditional PRIS uh through one platform right and then just building on that how should IT leaders assess their existing communications state and decide where to begin? So see most of them see it becomes really complicated and if you are a global organization uh having visibility uh a single centralized team doing the assessment it becomes really complicated for them right because they don't know how many people are using what kind of usage are there what are the use cases in different geographies different department etc. So there are specialized organizations like Tata communications is one of them which provides you with the entire assessment and migration uh support in this right. So we do the entire country by country department by department assessment what kind of usage you have what kind of licenses you need what kind of meeting rooms you need what kind of uh uh infrastructure you need. We help with the assessment of that. But uh obviously having the right count is important because it brings down the cost and doesn't uh put the unnecessary burden on you. So assessment becomes a really critical piece right you know because the biggest challenge the enterprise faces is at the end of the year they come and say oh we activated 10,000 users but only thousand of them are using it. So why are we spending that 9,000 let's uh reevaluate the entire project and shut it down. Right? So it's really important that you know what your use cases are and then do a proper assessment of what kind of uh deployment you actually need. Yeah, that's a good point. And how can organizations maintain resilience and service while changing business critical voice services? So see voice as a business is always about the trust right. So it's uh and that's why if you see uh getting within those longtail countries are much easier because the number of users are smaller the enterprises are willing to take a risk. So they are completely given it to a organization who can manage as many countries as possible. But when it comes to the critical countries the home country where they have a massive users they are more reluctant to move and rely on the incumbent operator whom they have worked with for a long time. But that's where the trust element, the managed services element come into picture. Once they start seeing the um full-fledged manage operator like data communication giving a quality services in few countries, they get more comfortable and uh keep on adding countries, right? But obviously for the critical destination wherever your core operation centers are it takes a lot of effort from the telos or the service provider to actually convince the enterprise to move because it their entire operation uh depends on it and then just looking at I mean what security and governance considerations should be addressed before the rollout begins not after. So see uh it depends uh depends upon the use case you're talking about like uh if we take a example of India right like there are banking regulation there are telemarketing regulation there are certain number of type of numbers only through which you can do telemarketing calls or transactional calls or financial uh calls. So you have to be very sure what is the use case your operator should be regulatory compliant. They should know what kind of calling is allowed, what kind of calling is not allowed, uh uh what can be supported, what cannot be, what use cases cannot be supported. So it becomes really important to partner with the right kind of operators because voice is something which is highly regulated. Each domestic country has their own regulation. Each because there there is apart from control there is no practical way to backtrack a voice calling until unless there is a compliant recording use case behind it. Right? So that's why the government and the regulators are particularly uh very strict about this. So you have to choose the right partner for having the right kind of use cases be regulatory compliant and obviously uh have a proper fraud uh protection uh as a solution by these operators to ensure uh uh your spam and robocalls all those kind of uh uh fraudulent practices is not getting impacting your business. That's a good point. And I mean looking ahead, how will AI and automation influence communications operations and what foundations must businesses establish first? So uh particularly see AI in a element is making conversation more convenient, right? So AI has access to your complete database, your source information, your CRM where your emails and everything. So when you're having a conversation, you can uh fetch data. It can support you with data points, your past reference commu uh communication. Uh so you can have a much better communication that way. But the quality of the voice, the quality, the security behind it would still remain on the telco and the network and the backbone they have, right? The kind of infrastructure they have because that remains the core. But obviously how to make that conversation better and more efficient that's where AI plays a big role. And obviously there are use cases like security uh uh trend uh pattern recognition to identify fraud and other things. Those kind of use cases are coming in big time uh with advent of AI right with more and better and better machine learning uh fraud can be detected much earlier and uh the enterprise can lose less money and uh their credibility are less impacted uh through those. I think that's a good place to leave it. Vivek thank you very much for joining me today. If people want to uh get in touch, what's the best way? So uh you can reach out to our Tata communication global rapid platform. Uh uh you can go to our website and get more details on each of the solutions we have on voice and UKcast as a single point of contact across 58 countries. And uh obviously you can reach out to your respective account managers uh from Tata communication and they can run you in detail of whatever queries and assessment which you requirement which you might have. Thanks again D. If you like this video please give us a like and a share on social media and we'll see you next time. I've been Christopher Carey for UC today. Thanks for watching.