UC Lifecycle Consulting

Unified Communications Strategy and Roadmap

This offering combines business and technical consulting to define a phased roadmap for enterprise-wide strategic Unified Communications (UC) planning, including business and use case development where required. The planning process begins with the discovery of current and future organizational and business requirements, including Instant Messaging (IM) and presence, voice, audio / video / web conferencing and other UC workloads. Then begins the definition of technical requirements, identifying viable solution alternatives, developing a strategic and holistic strategy from those alternatives, and creating an econometric model defining the cost of ownership and expected return on investment and risk profile. The transformation roadmap is comprised of a series of actionable steps over a multi-year period to transform the organization to the desired architecture.

Unified Communications Readiness

UC Readiness is an assessment program which is often delivered as part of the UC Strategy and Roadmap or UC Life Cycle Deployment services but may also be provided on a stand-alone basis. The primary focus of a readiness assessment is to identify any potential gaps that would negatively impact the deployment of UC services. UC Readiness includes such activities as evaluating customer plans, architecture, design, and existing deployments and operations of the UC infrastructure. Other elements under consideration may include migration readiness, bandwidth / capacity planning, network assurance prior to UC launch, the readiness of staffing, and availability of operational platforms and processes to adequately support and deliver 'day 2' support services.

Unified Communications Life Cycle Deployment Services

Many large enterprises have made significant investments in UC infrastructure, but need assistance in integrating the solution components, especially in complex and multivendor environments. ENCINC Consulting has extensive experience with large scale and complex UC planning, design, engineering and implementation. A key value to our clients is the capability to support architecture development, detailed design, integration and deployment for multivendor UC solutions. Planning includes such vital functions as project planning, use case development, detailed technical requirements, regulatory requirements, high level manufacturer systems design, engineering templates, specific site engineering, multisite installation generation, operations management planning and transitional support to 'day 2' operations. Design and engineering activities include complete system design, IP addressing and LAN segmentation, directory services and federation design, IM, Presence, audio/video/web Conferencing, unified messaging and global voice strategy including dial plans, route patterns, QoS design and engineering. The integration phase includes staging, pilot deployment, quality assurance, installation and back-out plans, production deployment, user cutovers and transitional operations support and escalation. These services can be delivered as an integrated life cycle transformation program or individually as 'a la carte' services based on customer needs.

Unified Communications SIP Integration

Traditional telecommunications systems were primarily based on circuit-switched transport services. With the introduction of IP-based voice, organizations began moving line-side telephony services to Voice over IP (VoIP). More recently, service providers have expanded this capability to begin offering IP-based PSTN trunking services based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP Trunking provides organizations with increased capability and control over voice calls and adds unique features (such as Virtual Telephone Numbers and integrated access) not available in a legacy transport environment. The UC SIP Integration service provides planning, design and integration of SIP solutions with gateways, network transport and customer UC application servers.

Unified Communications Conferencing Integration

New UC deployments are driving customers to more effectively integrate their existing audio and video conferencing solutions. The UC Conferencing Integration service provides planning, architecture, detailed design and integration of customer audio, video and web conferencing solutions with both standard and high-definition room-based conferencing platforms including, ENCINC Connect, Cisco, Polycom, Tandberg, and others.

Microsoft Technologies Consulting

Life cycle services supporting health checks, architecture, design, deployment and accelerated migrations of Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, Windows Media Services, SQL Server, Microsoft Clustering, Systems Center Operations Manager, Systems Center Configuration Manager, Windows Mobile integration and Windows/HyperV.

For more information on other Enterprise UC offers from ENCINC, please contact us for more information.