Arkadin: Transforming Business through Cloud-Based Unified Communications

Scott McMaster, VP, Sales & Marketing, Americas

1. According to Arkadin, what are the key factors that hamper a company’s digital transformation journey?

Digital transformation has moved from being an exciting concept to an accepted reality in the business world. Companies are unshackling their communication infrastructure from the local environment and migrating to cloud to provide users a single, coherent virtual environment to connect from anywhere, anytime. Cloud-based unified communications (UC), for voice, messaging, mobility, and collaboration, offers improved communications, streamlined administration, and cost optimization. Although many UC and collaboration projects are underway in many companies, most of these organizations struggle to bring their efforts to fruition. Without the right mindset and skill set, most enterprises will fall short of their objectives, under-deliver ROI and frustrate their user community.

A recent study by Forbes estimated that 75 percent of enterprises fail in their digital transformation initiatives because of the complexities that accompany their digital transformation journey. Many organizations don’t know how to translate a transformation strategy into an executable plan. These strategic blind spots can be attributed to the lack of expertise in assessing an organization’s UC requirements, selecting the right UC technology, and optimizing their approach – they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’. Also, organizations fail to engage stakeholders, focusing solely on the technology and not on the people who will use it. Successful digital transformation requires expertise across multiple technologies and disciplines, including planning, provisioning, voice, network, collaboration, desktop services, and support.

2. How does Arkadin prove instrumental in the digital transformation journey?

Arkadin helps our clients mitigate risk and navigate complexity at every stage of the digital transformation journey. Arkadin’s Cloud Transformation Services offering an entirely new, consultative approach for deploying UC. Founded in 2001, Arkadin, a Microsoft Gold Partner, has rapidly become a leading cloud-based UC service provider helping businesses implement scalable UC infrastructure and achieve high ROI. We understand the complexity of UC, and we’re experts in cloud voice, so we deliver rich industry experience to each client. Arkadin takes a consultative approach, diving deep into business discovery, assessment, and goal setting for every digital transformation project, regardless of where a company is in their digital journey.

Without the right mindset and skill set, most enterprises will fall short of their objectives, under-deliver ROI and frustrate their user community

3. Could you elaborate on your unique digital transformation strategy?

Unlike many UC enablers, Arkadin begins each client relationship with what we call an Envision Workshop. It’s a discovery session where our experts work with clients to identify and understand a client’s UC goals and collaboration strategy to develop a clear, executable plan for their organization. Once we agree on the approach, our consultants perform assessments on different kinds of users and identify the various types of workloads in the organization. This information helps in driving seamless collaboration between technical, business, and end-user components. We then design and prepare for the cloud-based UC deployment.

In the delivery phase, we roll-out the appropriate UC solution for our clients to promote collaboration and enable their teams to make faster decisions as they approach business issues and solve problems together. Finally, in the operational phase, we deliver management and administrative services to optimize the UC performance and user experience.

To sum up what Arkadin Cloud Transformation Services does, we provide a cost-effective UC migration strategy and transition to the cloud, so clients can better focus on their core business. With more than 15 years of expertise in cloud transformation services, Arkadin is regarded as a highly trusted partner, serving customers that are spread across 30 countries. Our longstanding partnerships with leaders such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Avaya, among others, help our 25,000 customers worldwide achieve favorable business outcomes through digital transformation.

4. Could you give us an example where Arkadin was instrumental in addressing the challenges faced by its client?

A large global organization operating in more than 40 countries recently approached Arkadin to overcome a challenging UC rollout for their global user base. The client’s UC project was struggling to make it through the final phase of cloud transformation journey. In less than two weeks, we gathered their team for a discovery ‘Envision Workshop’ to understand their UC goals and the needs of the end user community, and priorities of different user personas. Through that Envision Workshop, we uncovered significant knowledge and planning gaps and developed an effective plan to tackle the shortcomings. Soon, we enabled them to successfully move their enterprise voice and communications to the cloud.

5. What is the methodology that you take to ensure a high Quality of Experience (QoE) for your clients?

In addition to rolling out the best fit UC solution, we also ensure the Quality of Experience (QoE) for our client’s user community. We achieve this through our continuous focus on measuring and monitoring of crucial analytics such as voice quality scoring, quality trends and call statistics reports that monitor the QoE being delivered to the end users. In addition, the firm also offers best-in-class training to engage the users early in the planning process and then give them training not only specific to their use cases but also based on the issues that are emanating from BYOD implementation.

6. What are Arkadin’s future endeavors?

As UC and collaboration are emerging as a powerful tool to drive the efficiency of today’s mobile workforce, business leaders need to rethink their organizational structure. Our goal is to enable C-suite executives to bring new levels of agility and innovation in their digital transformation initiatives by encouraging team collaboration and knowledge sharing.