Mastering the Edge of Cloud Telco

For employees working from home, whether customer-facing or internal, the only reliable and guaranteed media path has been a landline for decades. Phone and video calls over a home Internet link and average Wi-Fi network have been nearly impossible when it comes to a high-quality user experience. Why?

Once the Internet connection is put under any pressure by the user transferring files or accessing a bandwidth-hungry application, calls may become inaudible and even drop. We've all experienced this, especially over the past few years, as Work from Home models have become the rule and not the exception.

Within an enterprise's office location, this issue is resolved with adequate bandwidth but, more importantly, by voice and video communication receiving the highest priority when traversing the enterprise WAN.

Software Defined - Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) achieves this by applying policy rules to WAN traffic regardless of the transport method, but even with the best routing and prioritization software in the cloud and network, there remain growing problems at the edge, which is driving tremendous innovation in software and hardware (CPE) development, especially among Managed Service Providers.

The new state of Nirvana is delivering the highest audio and video quality over IP. For two companies that have partnered to bring exceptional experiences at the very edge of the thriving cloud-based communications infrastructure, this invokes automation, AI, and the collection and analysis of real-time data all the way down to every connected device, regardless of device type.

ConnX and Nectar Services Corp. recently announced the availability of an advanced edge experience assurance solution designed to ensure every voice and collaboration interaction is excellent on every endpoint and every step of the way.

ConnX has been managing large enterprise networks in the retail, manufacturing, healthcare, government, and financial services sectors for nearly three decades. Its ConnX Virtual Edge (CVE) has been in place and serving Fortune 500 companies as real-time communications and collaboration shifted dramatically to the cloud.

Nectar's software solutions, delivered as a service in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid model, are embedded into the ConnX AI Active Assurance offering. Nectar brings to the collaboration dynamic geospatial dashboards which provide location-based views of usage and user experience metrics that enable IT support and managed services teams to drill down on individual users, locations, and sessions to troubleshoot issues quickly.

These user-based dashboards give ConnX managed services support teams full context into an individual user's devices, client versions, and network connections with correlated insights and a real-time health assessment (powered by Nectar's proprietary User Health Index) for fast troubleshooting. ConnX integrates Nectar's solution into a broader partner ecosystem, simplifying the client experience and helping resolve issues more efficiently.

"ConnX has been working with Nectar for over ten years, collaborating with them through the rapid evolution from traditional infrastructure to cloud networking solutions," said Jeff Li, Senior Director, Risk, Governance, Partners, and Projects at ConnX. "By bringing together two talented engineering teams around a common vision – to bring the highest quality real-time communications services to enterprise customers and contact center and CX providers at a level they've never seen before – we are dramatically improving how the 'borderless enterprise' can deliver consistently excellent interactions with their customers and partners. The pandemic caused us to work harder and faster than ever as the evolution to the cloud became a revolution, and together our offering addresses the hardest challenges."

"Working with ConnX, we've been able to bring enterprises more visibility into private, public, and hybrid cloud UCaaS services," said Steph Shaw, Strategic Alliance Manager, Nectar. "Our combination of strengths, including our great teams and common vision, make it possible to bring enterprises and departments insights their teams need. We are proud to enhance ConnX's AI Active Assurance premium offerings and support their next-level AI SD-WAN capabilities."

Nectar was founded on the idea that voice and video are a unique workload within IT, and over the years, it has proven its value in day-to-day telephony operations within many of the world's largest organizations.

By instrumenting devices used for daily internal and external communications with additional software, the two companies have gone way beyond intelligent routing for quality and resiliency, advancing into software that validates and makes instantly visible controls associated with the management of every session.

The future is applying analytics to generate BI insights that have a direct impact on business outcomes, whether companies wish to grow revenues by improving customer experience or to improve profitability.

"We are very proud of our collective solution and grateful for the partnerships we have been blessed with as we have always been able to succeed when we can truly help leaders across the entire organization to drive increasingly positive business outcomes," Li said.

The ability to grapple with big problems like guaranteed Quality of Experience (QoE) at the edge is part of what is driving growth in the MSP industry.

According to Grand View Research, the global managed services market size was estimated at $267.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $299.01 billion in 2023.

Grand View writes, "Managed services reduce downtime redundancy and provide customized value-added services like application testing, service catalog building, and expert consultancy. Multiple monitoring tools and several layers of infrastructure managed by isolated teams contribute to the market growth."

Grand View also stated:

"Factors such as improving operational efficiency by focusing more effectively on core competencies, cutting operating expenses, and increasing the use of cloud-based technologies such as automation, IoT, blockchain, and cloud computing are driving the market growth. Moreover, managed services focus on providing secure and customized IT solutions and end-to-end hosting applications is expected to drive market growth. Additionally, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruption in business operations and the supply chain. Thus, with a sudden change in business operations and remote working solutions, employees required access to different work applications for company-owned devices. Organizations have therefore started relying more on managed services during the Covid-19 pandemic."