Riverbed SteelCentral UCExpert Maximizes UC Quality on Avaya, Microsoft and Cisco

Communicating via quality voice and video conversations is essential for keeping happy employees, partners and customers. Perhaps most importantly, ensuring quality conversations is a big part of your job security. It doesn’t matter if you’re an MSP, VAR, Interconnect, channelHeidi Gabrielson.jpg or the IT director, it’s your position on the line when things don’t work right.

Fortunately for you and your career, there is Riverbed and their latest version of SteelCentral UCExpert which is designed to help solve your quality problems. I had an in-depth interview with Heidi Gabrielson, Director of Product Marketing as well as David Roberts, Product Manager in order to present you with how the company can help.

To flesh out the problem a bit more, keeping unified communications unified can be a challenge with all the variables including migrating, designing and implementing the right communications and collaboration products. Having complete visibility, monitoring and control across the communications spectrum is critical according to the company. From there we went on to discuss Riverbeds’s automated testing, remote troubleshooting, intelligent performance monitoring and comprehensive reporting capabilities.

Heidi explained SteelCentral is really a visibility solution which goes hand-in-hand with WAN optimization. It allows you to see what is going on and fix it. She summarized, saying you get end-to-end visibility from application performance monitoring to Java, .NET, network performance management, flow and packet visibility, infrastructure monitoring like SNMP and video.

David Roberts.jpgIn addition to flow and packet-based metrics from the network, you can pair that with CDR and endpoint data, allowing for a holistic solution.

This new version takes the guesswork out of performance management and troubleshooting for Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft Skype for Business UC solutions. Regardless how enterprises mixed and matched these technologies within the business, UCExpert makes answering “Who, What, Where, When, and How” easier because the underlying methodology of problem solving combines information about end users, the devices they use, the network path involved, and the call data in a consistent way. This may be surprising to companies who aren’t in this situation, many Riverbed customers have all three UC environments at once and David says they will for years to come.

SteelCentral UCExpert helps enterprises to:

  • Justify UC investments by understanding UC performance adoption and usage
  • Quickly identify root causes of network degradations, device errors or user mistakes
  • Reduce number of escalations by enabling desktop support to be more self-sufficient

Where does this product fit onto the company’s extensive product line? SteelCentral UCExpert is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, which includes Riverbed SteelCentral for network visibility and control, Riverbed SteelFusion for centralizing remote office IT, SD-WAN solutions, plus open APIs and developer tools, called SteelScript, to facilitate platform programmability, interoperability, and intelligence. The goal for organizations running on the Riverbed Application Performance Platform is to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are diagnosed and cured before end-users notice. This is really what companies often call proactive IT support.

A low-res pic of SteelCentral UCExpert
SteelCentral UCExpert.jpg

Dave went on to say solutions need to be probe-less, like theirs to scale properly.

He further explained that probes are like radar – you can put them at chokepoints and see the traffic is slow in certain areas but this doesn’t give you a view of the whole highway/network. “You can’t put probes everywhere,” he exclaimed.

In addition, if you use their WAN Optimization solutions you also get the advantages of compression and deduplication. He added that there are 100,000 SteelHeads in the field already and they can now be used for measuring traffic.

The bottom line is UCExpert makes answering “Who, What, Where, When, and How” easier because the underlying methodology of problem solving combines information about end users, the devices they use, the network path involved, and the call data in a consistent way.

The old adage about not being able to monitor it if you can’t measure it comes to mind. This is the point of this product – to help collaboration quality be at the highest level possible by proactively managing impending and current network issues so all users are happy and productive.

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