Successfully Troubleshooting Skype for Business (EMEA)

A revolution is underway. Microsoft is disrupting the Intelligent Communications landscape.

With the addition of Teams, Microsoft has advanced its vision for Universal Communications to one of Intelligent Communications and Collaboration. This saw many predict the end to Skype for Business, however, at the very same conference Microsoft also announced a new Skype for Business server release for 2018.

Working in collaborative spaces on projects can help drive productivity, it won’t take away the underlying requirement for people to ‘jump on a quick call’. While Teams can offer a different experience to Skype for Business, the Enterprise communications focus of Skype for Business will continue to stay as it starts to move to Teams in a couple of years based on their IT plan. Because Skype for Business is frequently used in a multi-vendor environment that includes Cisco, Avaya, Acme Packet, Sonus, AudioCodes and/or other vendors, the ability to manage the complete user experience, end-to-end across all technologies and vendors, is a top concern for IT Operations.

Companies that do not prioritize this will experience lengthy downtime and quality issues, while the operations department tries to find the root cause of an issue. This can significantly slow adoption, lead to lost or disgruntled customers, and impact the initial deployment ROI. In addition, as a real-time communications tool, Skype for Business requires real-time performance management.

Join us during the session as Prognosis gives you everything you need to identify and eradicate problems before they impact the user experience from pre-deployment network assessments – the first Microsoft certified tool that validates if you are ready for production – through to ongoing post-deployment testing. Prognosis enables you to understand your full application environment as well as the network impact. It has no reliance on probes or taps or anything you’d consider intrusive on the network.

This session will focus on how IR can help your team remain connected during these unique times. Below are some use cases we will cover:

- Remote worker deployment
- Shared resource issues across the enterprise ie licensing, bandwith, VPN limits
- Customer experience testing

Hosted by Chuck Geisler, Senior Solutions Engineer, with live Q&A.

IR's Channel Team is back with another virtual event! Join us to get to know the IR team and learn how we can work together to deliver success to our mutual customers.

Managing the performance of Unified Communications is complex, with many different technologies, stakeholders and partners working together to make everything work as intended. With so much going on, it’s important to Get the Recipe Right.

IR’s unique technology and know-how, combined with the world-class services provided by IR channel partners can deliver the right outcomes (recipes!) for our mutual customers.

Please join us as we share some knowledge, best practices, align our abilities, cook, break bread together, enhance our relationships and discuss how we can partner better for our mutual customers.

Get the Recipe Right - Summer BBQ Edition will feature some exciting BBQ dishes, after you register we'll send you a recipe or two so you can cook along from your home kitchen!

Due to the uncertainty COVID-19 has caused, many organizations are leading with caution – which includes travel suspended, new hire freezes and reduction in any unnecessary spending.

So what does this mean for service providers as they look to support their customers through this uncertain time?

Companies that were able, moved their entire workforce to remote environments. Unfortunately, many of these organizations do not have the necessary tools to support this new environment. With a sudden and rapid increase in VPN logins, video calls and conferences, in addition to network and bandwidth limitations, more UC-related issues are occurring.

According to Wainhouse Research, when surveying IT decision makers, “nearly the entire survey panel (94%) indicates that their organization has made changes to the ways their organization’s workforce communicates and collaborates.”

This means service providers can help their customers adapt and thrive in a situation where many businesses will fail. To do this, service providers should ensure they go beyond their SLAs agreements to retain and attract new customers.

There is not a single payment flow that has not been affected by what is happening in today's world. As we begin to shift from the unprecedented emergency to the new normal, organizations – from retail to banks – are adjusting quickly to the short and long-term impacts.

Thriving and leading amidst the pandemic requires adapting, innovating and optimizing the underlying technology that meets consumer demands and changes in purchasing behaviors. Join Celent, industry experts in financial services, and IR, leading solution provider for payments performance management, to learn how you can manage through and beyond the changes.

Key webinar discussion topics will include:

•Different challenges and ways of responding across the industry
•How increased merchant disputes and fraud are impacting the bottom-line and top-line
•Delays in current payments initiatives and adjustments in investment priorities
•What we can expect going forward with the acceleration of digital and contact free payments
•Importance of providing real-time payments insights and how you can gain competitive differentiation
•And more!

This session will focus on how Prognosis can help teams remain connected during these unique times,cover use cases such as License Auditing & Alerting, Endpoint Registration, and User Experience from Home.

Hosted by Annie Leduc, one of our Senior Solutions Engineers, with live Q&A.

In an effort to support businesses around the globe, IR has leveraged it's long standing and strategic partnership with BT, one of the world’s leading communications services companies, to bring our community a live talk webinar where we discuss the extensive measures organizations are taking to scale-up remote working quickly, as well as how BT and IR have supported this need.

Along with how organisations look to keeping the modern workforce connected, we will also discuss the potential of this becoming the new way of working.

Below are the key themes and topics to be discussed:

• How are Service Providers stepping in?
• UC is a combination of software and services. What are Service Providers doing to help, or being asked for?
• How are BT and IR customers changing their strategies to keep their people connected?
• What strategies should IT leaders adapt to drive a connected workforce? Where does security play a part?
• What happens once the dust has settled?

Real-time payments is a gold rush of sorts – global financial institutions are racing to embrace it, but not everyone has the tools and infrastructure in place to capitalize on the benefits and deliver superior payment experiences.

With customer expectations and changing purchasing behaviors at an all-time high in today’s on demand, real-time world – we’re witnessing an acceleration in demand for real-time payments due to infrastructure modernization, expensive competitive alternatives, adoption of modern message standards and more.

This evolving frontier is just the beginning of changes and new expectations for the payments industry. Join Celent, industry experts in financial services, and IR, leading solution provider for payments performance management, for an information-packed webinar to learn more about:

•What does real-time payments mean to you?
•How we got to where we are today and what changes are ahead for legacy systems
•Use cases of how real-time payments has transformed business offerings
•Unlocking the future and value of real-time payments
•And more!

10 Questions IT Leaders Ask to Keep the Modern Workforce Connected
** How UC Performance Management Solutions Can Help **

How UC Performance Management Solutions Can Help

COVID-19 has pushed the world to reevaluate the way we live – interactions with others, human connection, family priorities, consumer purchasing and even business operations. In this time of uncertainty, we are learning to adapt and be agile to keep our business connected and maintain customer service.

Impact:
Businesses are experiencing travel restrictions, supply chain shortages, and many are contending with the requirement to have a completely remote workforce. As a result, new technology and processes are quickly being implemented to support this rapid digital transformation.

In order to succeed in this new norm, its vital your UC and collaboration tools are working properly. If teams cannot communicate and customers cannot be served digitally, businesses will fail. Now more than ever, IT leaders are challenged to have the right mix of tools to ensure business continuity, and many are finding that UC Performance Management solutions play a critical role in their company’s success. When your UC solutions don’t work properly, agile solutions that give you deep insights, and quick troubleshooting capabilities will ensure you find and fix the problem before it impacts your employees or customers.

Expect to Learn:
- Understand the impact of COVID-19, and new ways to approach IT strategies
- Strategies that IR customers are evaluating
- The important role customer satisfaction plays in your organization’s success

With the world moving to remote work overnight, organizations are facing a whole set of new challenges.

David Byrum, GM at Human Synergistics, will be joined by Vanessa Walker, Chief People and Culture Officer at IR, to share their insights on why culture and leadership are critical for organisations to maintain performance during the Great Isolation.

The session will cover the three keys to remote success: culture, leadership and communication. With time for live Q&A and tips and tricks.

The success of our world economy largely relies on human movement and consumer buying behavior. With an overall shift in the way we’re transacting due to the impacts of COVID-19, new paradigms in the payments space are emerging and there’s an increased need for resiliency, stability, and automated operations to ensure day-to-day transaction continuity.

While this pandemic has created instability and uncertainty, consumers are adapting rapidly, and financial institutions are closely re-examining their business strategies and future-proofing their mission-critical infrastructure to manage new payment methods and the surge in digital and contactless payments.

Join ACI, IR and your peers to learn why proactive transaction monitoring and real-time visibility across your entire payments environment play a critical role in providing the clarity and certainty that transactions are being accepted across all payment systems and channels – ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and optimizing revenue flow.

IR's Channel Road Show is going virtual for Cinco de Mayo. Join us to get to know the IR team and learn how we can work together to deliver success to our mutual customers.

Managing the performance of Unified Communications is complex, with many different technologies, stakeholders and partners working together to make everything work as intended. With so much going on, it’s important to Get the Recipe Right.

IR’s unique technology and know-how, combined with the world-class services provided by IR channel partners can deliver the right outcomes (recipes!) for our mutual customers.

Please join us as we share some knowledge, best practices, align our abilities, cook, break bread together, enhance our relationships and discuss how we can partner better for our mutual customers.

Get the Recipe Right - Cinco de Mayo Edition will feature some exciting Latin dishes, after you register we'll send you a recipe or two so you can cook along from your home kitchen!

In an effort to support businesses around the globe who have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, IR has joined forces with Avaya to provide insight and advice on how you can maintain business continuity, productivity and user experience in a remote working world.

While there are various travel restrictions on both a domestic and international scale, many organizations have told employees to work from home. Remote working has seen a rapid increased adoption over the past few weeks.

Join IR and Avaya for an exclusive webinar discussion on 23 April, 2020 at 3pm CET / 2pm BST.
Key themes of the discussion will include:

• How to maintain productivity: thoughts from the panel on managing a remote team effectively and ensuring the right tools are deployed.

• Case study: Over 300,000 Remote Agents transitioned to date around the globe in response to Covid 19. IR supporting multiple on premise and remote workers across global territories.

• What does it take? Remote working requirements, setup, connectivity and supporting remote workers.

This session will focus on how Prognosis can help teams remain connected during these unique times. Looking at specific use cases:

- Remote worker deployment
- Shared resource issues across the enterprise ie licensing, bandwith, VPN limits
- Customer experience testing

Hosted by Chuck Geisler, one of our Senior Solutions Engineer, with live Q&A.

Unified Communications has always been an important part of companies' digital transformation efforts due to its ability to enable rich virtual collaboration and communication. But with COVID-19, we've reached a break-through point.

In order to prevent the spread of the virus, social distancing has been adopted globally. Companies that can are sending workers home to work remotely, and consumers are preferring to interact with vendors online. As the level of emergency continues to increase, companies are experiencing a spike in call-in volumes, customer inquiries and online orders. Unified Communications was built for this, but it has never been pushed this hard.

Join Bill Haskins, Sr. Analyst & Partner, Unified Communications at Wainhouse Research, and John Ruthven, CEO at IR discuss UC challenges companies are experiencing due to the Coronavirus crisis.

During this session, you can expect to learn:
> How your peers are responding to the COVID-19 crisis
> Strategies your IT department can take to accelerate your digital environments
> Proactive UC solution approaches to streamline operations in the future

Today’s consumers are demanding more purchasing options and convenience than ever before. This has spurred a digital transformation that is reshaping how retailers and issuers do business now and in the future.

The need to reinvent cards for the digital world, solve for digital commerce and continuously innovate in consumer payments are imperative to enhancing customer satisfaction and gaining a competitive edge.

Join IR, Celent and your peers as we discuss the top ten predictions for retail payments in 2020 and how evolving your payment solutions will help you stay ahead of your customers’ expectations while providing you assurance your payments are being processed smoothly and efficiently.

Join our monthly live demo session of Prognosis for UC. The session is hosted by one of our Senior Solutions Engineers, providing an overview of Prognosis' capabilities to troubleshoot, monitor and optimize communications environments. With true multi-vendor visibility across Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft.

The session also provides a great opportunity for live Q&A.

Just as people need proactive regular check-ups to ensure they stay in good health, it’s important for hospitals to proactively manage the health and performance of their communications environment to set them up for long-term high performance.

IR prognosis provides real-time insight into the key health indicators of your communications ecosystem and can even provide guidance on how to address any problems that are identified.

Whether you’re preparing for open enrollment, upgrading your telemedicine capabilities, or working on future enhancements to deliver better experiences for patients, learn how Prognosis real-time performance management can help you keep your finger on the pulse.

Live demo session of Prognosis for UC with one of our Senior Solutions Engineers.