Digital Workspace

If you haven’t moved some portion of your collaboration needs to the cloud yet, you are likely thinking about it. While on-premises communications platforms had been popular for the past several decades, “the times they are a-changin.” Almost every customer I talk to is planning a move to the cloud for at least some portion of their communications strategy. Most are doing it to get out of the server management business, while others are more focused on the continued advancements that cloud brings.

Luckily, I have had the opportunity to focus on the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market for the past couple years and have witnessed the growth of some of our closest partners here at CDW. Over the past couple months, I’ve worked to get our Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) services off the ground, and I thought I would share some of what I learned through that process, as much of what I saw will be compelling to many of our customers.

Wouldn’t it be great if your organization could phase out dozens of physical primary storage arrays, while retaining the same functionality of those arrays? Can you imagine if you could reduce your physical storage array count to one ― one physical array to “care and feed,” but at the same time have dozens or as many as 1,024 different primary storage arrays to use as needed? With all the same functionality and benefits?

You’re in luck, because HPE’s Primera has a built-in feature supporting secure multitenancy (SMT) which HPE calls Primera virtual domains.

Those who remember the “New Coke” debut in 1985 will understand just how useful sentiment analysis can be when a brand is considering a major change, such as introducing a new product. If the Coca-Cola Company had this tool back then, it might have determined that New Coke wasn’t such a wise move.

Today, companies have the benefit of data analysis to measure customer perception. That data comes in many forms, from social media chatter to formal instruments such as surveys. But sentiment analysis, a discipline of machine learning, is what makes that data so useful.

Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to apply an algorithm to data sets. By searching for keywords or other markers, it reveals insights that organizations can incorporate into future planning. In essence, it delivers a baseline analysis for whatever an organization wants to measure and then helps to guide future decision-making or the implementation of necessary course corrections.

A customer of mine, a tech company, receives relatively few customer calls overnight — usually just a couple dozen. Currently, the employees fielding those calls are all working from home, separated from one another, and it wasn’t until the end of a recent shift that all of them realized that no one had received a single call. The company’s telephone line was out, but no one knew it for about eight hours.

This happens far too often: Companies experience problems with their collaboration systems, but don’t catch them for hours or even days. Synthetic testing — in which a tool simulates user traffic to proactively detect and resolve outages or performance issues — is an effective solution to this problem. Through synthetic testing of collaboration systems, a partner such as CDW can automatically test the phone systems several times an hour to ensure that they are working as expected and record the entire customer experience.

Here are three scenarios where synthetic testing can add value to your collaboration systems.

Are your IT tools, teams and processes disconnected? Is your organization struggling to keep your CMDB relevant? Do you lack visibility and decisioning insights across the IT landscape?

Digital workflows often involve many diverse apps, platforms and data. Teams that need to work together are often separated by activities performed in disparate applications and tools. Figuring out where to start and how to manage it all can be overwhelming, and that’s where CDW and ServiceNow’s IntegrationHub can help.

As we anticipate the expansion of 5G networking, many of us look forward to its high-speed connectivity — eventually up to 10 gigabits per second. Others are eager for its expanded bandwidth, capable of supporting a massive number of devices. Still, others have an eye on 5G’s ultralow latency, taking minimal time to move data from device to cloud and back again.

The real appeal of 5G, I believe, will be in the powerful combination of all these advantages. I see 5G as a foundational platform that will enable emerging technologies, particularly the Internet of Things, to fully mature. Although plenty of IoT devices are on the 4G spectrum, it lacks the capability to support the device explosion that many see as the future of IoT. Those same limitations don’t apply to the 5G spectrum.