Today, I’m happy to let you know that Plantronics and Nectar are introducing the industry’s first ear-to-ear (e2e) unified communications (UC) diagnostics solution, extending call visibility past the desktop. Nectar UC Diagnostics troubleshoots network issues contributing to poor UC experiences and along with the actionable insights from Plantronics Manager Pro software-as-a-service (SaaS), can be used to improve your customers’ UC experience.

Nectar and Plantronics are bringing two stellar communications solutions together to provide diagnostics showing call-specific health statistics for wireless headsets. Until now, the last three feet of the UC network has been out of reach to the enterprise IT team. This new solution goes beyond traditional UC diagnostic solutions that end at the desktop and now gives IT the ability to see network health all the way to the end user’s Bluetooth headset.

Using this solution, enterprises and UC service providers can diagnose issues faster than in the past and they can track and make decisions from these actionable insights over time. This means call quality issues—no matter what is causing them—won’t ever get in the way of the ability to deliver superior customer service and user experience before an issue is ever detected.

Many factors can impact the quality of a UC session. The “data-your-way” philosophy built into the Plantronics Manager Pro offering extends Nectar’s capability with e2e diagnostics for Plantronics touchpoints providing this entirely new level of visibility into the last few feet of connectivity.

Last September, Nectar announced their agreement to develop this e2e diagnostics solution with us. Now, link quality is collected for the Plantronics Voyager UC family of headsets (excluding Voyager Legend, Voyager Edge and Voyager 104). And, it’s officially available for purchase through authorized Nectar and Plantronics partners.

Nectar’s initial release of this solution will support Skype for Business on-premise deployments, with additional UC platform and cloud service support to be added over time.

Plantronics has been focusing in recent years on capturing new opportunities as the communication landscape shifts to the cloud. As communications, and the technologies designed to deliver them, shift in response a workforce increasingly in motion, the opportunities to add value with our solutions have multiplied.

Plantronics has always been a leader in providing innovative, high-quality headsets to large enterprises and contact centers. But as the communication landscape in those markets have shifted, we recognized that software and open APIs can enhance and extend the headset experience for our customers and the partners who service them.

In recent years, Plantronics has built-in data capture into our latest headset devices and now provide software applications such as Plantronics Hub and Plantronics Manager Pro to organize this data to give IT and contact center managers additional insights into their communications environments. In order to extend the reach of Plantronics Manager Pro data insights to our software ecosystem partners, Plantronics has made Open Data Access (ODA) and related APIs publicly available on our Plantronics Manager Pro Developer Portal, a first to market program in our industry.

With ODA program integrations, Enterprise IT and call center managers can benefit from the ability to extend the information in the software dashboards they use today to monitor their communications environment to include data related to how the headset interacts with their other communication tools. The addition of Plantronics ODA insights allows for the last three feet of analytics related to the headset to create software visibility of ear-to-ear diagnostics.

How are these benefits possible? Developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) can gain access to all of the data elements included in Plantronics Manager Pro to build and monetize new innovative software applications to measure the end-to-end communication system. Also, enterprises that have developers in-house, can integrate this data themselves into their custom software applications.

Nectar Partnership

One example of an exciting and innovative integration using ODA is the Plantronics partnership with Nectar Services Corp., a leader in the development and deployment of proactive network monitoring and performance management software for the UC industry. This week at Microsoft Ignite, Nectar announced their joint development and strategic alliance agreement with Plantronics. Nectar is leveraging select Plantronics Open Data Access APIs to deliver an ear-to-ear diagnostics solution. This integration specifically leverages the newly released Plantronics Bluetooth Link Quality APIs for select Plantronics devices to allow IT or call center managers that use the Nectar solution to be alerted to headset wireless audio quality issues which might be related to density, proximity, or situational interfering factors. This software product is expected to be available in the market by the end of 2017.

“We’re constantly innovating to find new ways to help organizations provide great user experiences across their UC platforms and we believe this partnership is the next step in advancing UC platform monitoring, reporting and diagnostics,” said Tom Tuttle, SVP UC Strategies and Global Alliances, Nectar. “With the new e2e diagnostics, managed service providers and resellers will optimize communications services and enterprises will find the quality of their calls remains at an optimum level.”

Innovate with Plantronics Open Data Access APIs

Plantronics is excited to work with partners and software developers who want to innovate in the communications landscape by integrating Plantronics headset analytics into their software. The Plantronics ODA is a tool our partners can leverage to commercialize new and exciting software integrations that work seamlessly with our enterprise software and headsets, creating software solutions our joint UC and contact center customers value.  More information on this opportunity can be found on our Plantronics Manager Pro Developer Portal.

NOTE: This week, the Plantronics team is in Orlando, Florida, for the annual Microsoft Ignite event, which has 20K+ attendees from around the world who want to meet with Microsoft employees and Microsoft Partner experts to learn about the latest technology trends. Plantronics will be showcasing our UC solutions at Booth #1937 – representing both our latest headset devices and software that work seamlessly together as a total solution around Skype for Business Enterprise UC deployments. We will be giving Plantronics Manager Pro software demos as well as talking about our Open Data Access APIs.

This post can be found on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/innovative-integrations-communications-environment-wendy-dawson/