I play the guitar and enjoy jamming with friends. Thanks to today’s real-time communication and collaboration tools, we don’t need to be in the same room or even the same country to work on new material.

As workforces become more mobile and global, digital communication and collaboration is becoming equally important in the enterprise. Although email remains a key business tool – more than 112 billion messages were sent or received every day in 2015 – users increasingly expect an immediate response. In the application economy, a delay of even a few minutes can result in lost business.

Web chats, video-conferences, online communities and instant messaging don’t just bring greater velocity to colleague and customer interactions, they also make them more personal.

Consistent user experience 

The growth in real-time digital interactions, however, comes with real-time consequences. Every video-conference or web chat initiated by a user puts an added strain on the corporate network. And that strain is increasing every day: by 2019, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the world’s networks every second.

To ensure every user enjoys a consistent experience when collaborating with colleagues or communicating with customers, organizations need to ensure every network component is performing at an optimal level.

As well as monitoring the network infrastructure, IT departments need to monitor the quality of service across different digital channels, such as video and voice over IP, and be able to answer important operational questions. Is bandwidth an issue? Is network availability reliant on a cloud provider? What quality-of-service thresholds have been configured?

Today’s networking stack is becoming increasingly complicated. By taking a holistic approach to network performance management, IT departments will be able to cut through this complexity, and link problems in the technology stack to their root cause with greater efficiency.

Greater agility, greater complexity

As more real-time unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions jostle for their space on the network, organizations will need to maximize not only performance but also capacity.

Software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) – with their flexible and scalable architectures – can help organizations cope with peaks in communication and collaboration demand, such as when a CEO hosts a webinar for thousands of employees.

But as SDN and NFV increase business agility, they can also increase operational complexity. Due to their dynamic and abstracted nature, they can’t be managed in the same way as their static networking counterparts.

As a result, IT departments don’t just need to be able to monitor SDN and virtualized assets; they need to be able to visualize them too. And do it in real-time. They need to know how the SDN stack in Shanghai is impacting a webinar in Washington and the experience of thousands of users around the world.

Given today’s rising service expectations and IT complexity, the need for holistic performance management has never been greater.

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