In 2020, Cisco introduced enhancements to the Webex cloud and Webex device series, providing a way to connect to Microsoft Teams meetings directly from Cisco video devices.

There are two technologies at play here: Cloud Video Interop (CVI) and Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC).

Many companies were already adopting collaboration technologies before the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring. But the massive shift to a remote work model has created a sort of forced proof of concept for numerous businesses, with employees and managers learning on the fly how to use these tools to support productivity and collaboration.

One thing that many business and IT leaders have discovered: Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions and a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) are often a good fit. UCaaS refers to cloud-delivered capabilities, including voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging, presence and other communication applications. With SD-WAN, advanced software simplifies the operation of complex WANs while optimizing the end-user experience.

Here are several reasons why these two technologies work so well together.

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.

Big changes are upon us when it comes to Cisco licensing. On Jan. 23, 2021, everything changes with Cisco Unified Communications Manager licenses. For some organizations, this will be a moment to celebrate, given the detailed complexity of Cisco’s reporting. Who hasn’t struggled at times to figure out what your organization owns, what’s covered and whether or not that’s reflected in the Cisco report?

You can say goodbye to perpetual license purchases and multiyear support contract renewals. No more deciphering what type of license you need based on the phone model you plan to buy. No more reviewing your Prime License Manager to see if you even need licenses. No more wading through the PLM output. Cisco has finally simplified its license consumption model.

“That’s it – we’re moving to another collaboration solution!” OK, be honest: Raise your hand if some version of the above crossed your mind in the past 9-10 months. I hear you loud and clear — you are frustrated with your collaboration provider.

For some businesses, it’s a budget issue; costs go up or you’re struggling to navigate a move from CAPEX to OPEX. For others, it’s the pace of change ― software upgrades are pushed out by the vendor, but now you have to upgrade your hardware. Something has changed with your collaboration platform that makes you unhappy. And while it is true that IT is the business of managing change and risk, that does not lessen your frustration.

I’ve been there too. I have spent most of my professional history in the role of an IT customer, so I have experienced the aggravations that come with managing and being accountable for corporate, foundational infrastructure. In my case it was the voice infrastructure.

Take a look under the hood of many companies’ collaboration environments today, and you’ll find what I call “organized chaos.” Employees are using collaboration tools to get things done, but they’re frequently toggling between different applications to message colleagues, manage calendars, share documents and initiate video meetings.

Many organizations support different collaboration tools across departments. This might make sense if, say, an engineering team benefits from a different collaboration workflow than what other business units use. However, collaboration environments are often not the result of strategic decisions, but rather an ad hoc approach when deploying technology tools.

In many cases, business units adopt a given collaboration solution simply because it’s one that employees are already familiar with. As a result, companies miss out on the benefits that come from adopting the tools that are best suited to helping them meet their business goals.