Integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS has both benefits and challenges

Now, communications come in many forms, including voice, video conferencing, conferencing services, messaging, streaming media, etc. Companies such as Avaya, Cisco and Vonage are bringing these capabilities together and selling them as unified communications or UC. As enterprises change their spending patterns and buy more communications-as-a-service, they can now purchase UC-as-a-Service, also known as UCaaS. When UCaaS connects a branch to headquarters, the service runs over a WAN connection. In addition, enterprises are deploying software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) to improve WAN management and cloud connectivity. Therefore, it seems that UCaas (which also runs over that Internet connection) can work well in tandem with SD-WAN. While integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS can provide some benefits to enterprises, it can present some challenges and hidden drawbacks. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of integrating SD-WAN and UCaaS. How SD-WAN and UCaaS work together There are advantages to combining SD-WAN and UCaaS, and here are three obvious ones. (1) Get better packet performance. Viewing both SD-WAN and UCaaS traffic helps improve video quality through better quality of service, while also reducing packet loss or packet redundancy. The potential benefits of more efficient bandwidth and the ability to identify prioritized traffic, while also addressing packet loss, can help improve overall communications. (2) Gain more complete visibility. SD-WAN combined with UCaaS provides a better understanding of the overall environment. The combination of these two technologies can make it easier to identify potential problems, especially if the two services have a shared control panel. (3) Adjust pricing levers. If SD-WAN and UCaaS are handled as a single transaction or as part of an overall service agreement, enterprises may gain procurement and support advantages from a single vendor. Why SD-WAN and UCaaS may not be a good match Can enterprises always improve efficiency when SD-WAN and UCaaS are combined? It may not always be the case. Enterprises should also consider some hidden drawbacks, including. (UCaaS is designed to cover the entire enterprise, not just the branch. If branch connectivity products are integrated with enterprise-wide communications products, enterprises may create suboptimal pairings. Even if an enterprise uses Cisco as its SD-WAN provider and UC provider, the enterprise either manages both products as separate entities in the Cisco environment, or this single-vendor dependency may come from a different company acquisition. The only real synergy may come from acquisition orders, but the acquisition cycles for these products may not be synchronized as different enterprises drive their own acquisition decisions. (SD-WAN deployments should be invisible to the applications and edge devices behind the SD-WAN devices. The whole idea behind SD-WAN is to abstract the control of the connection from everything that runs on it. If UCaaS traffic is optimized for a particular SD-WAN deployment (including hosted SD-WAN), this leads to bigger problems. That is, will the SD-WAN-UCaaS combination limit future enterprise decisions, especially if public cloud migration of these services is the long-term strategy? Ultimately, each enterprise's decision will be different when considering the integration of SD-WAN and UCaaS. However, before deciding, enterprises should consider both positive and negative outcomes. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)