Unified communications are now the backbone of seamless workplace collaboration, bringing together platforms like Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Google Meet into one smooth workflow. Ensuring these complex systems remain reliable and perform optimally has driven innovations in automation and DevOps, focused on enhancing user experience and minimising downtime. Leading these innovative efforts is Ramesh Lakshmikanth, whose work has played a key role in boosting the efficiency and resilience of unified communications systems. Ramesh’s work centres on developing scalable DevOps automation tailored specifically for unified communications environments. One of his most impactful innovations is the “Room Sweep automation”. This system places automated test calls from every conference room daily, early in the morning before business hours, to gather call path data, endpoint status, and cloud bridge provider performance across Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Google Meet. This data feeds into a comprehensive dashboard offering a clear health overview of conference rooms and networking. This monitoring efficiently [L1] improved conference room availability, reduced outages, and helped detect network degradation swiftly. Along with this, the engineer implemented “Self-Heal automation”. This feature automatically detects and resolves common issues found during Room Sweep tests. For example, if a room fails to place calls, shows errors, or experiences peripheral non-responsiveness or packet loss, the system starts fixing the problems. It can reboot affected endpoints, reset network interfaces, or create support tickets directed to the appropriate teams. This automation has reduced troubleshooting times and minimised disruptions during meetings significantly. Further, the “Daily Room Health” dashboard developed using Power BI provides granular insights into room conditions by region and building, enabling proactive management of communication ecosystems. Additionally, the expert introduced “Call Health Analytics” by embedding macro code in endpoints to export call quality data into a SQL database after each call, allowing deep analysis of call quality trends and broader issue identification. Beyond technical achievements, these innovations delivered definable business benefits. By replacing an expensive third-party monitoring tool with in-house solutions, Ramesh’s team saved the organisation approximately $700,000 annually. The proactive detection of over 27 major outages and the remediation of more than 800 endpoint failures within one year prevented significant business impacts and improved overall service quality. One of the key challenges the strategist overcame was integrating network services not fully controlled by his team. Through strategic collaboration and partnership with network management teams, he successfully enabled automation triggers involving network switches, strengthening the holistic monitoring approach. Reflecting on his experience, Ramesh stresses the value of custom-built tools to address unique organisational needs. “Building tools in-house allows us to tackle challenges that off-the-shelf solutions cannot, focusing on user experience and productivity rather than generic features,” he added. Looking ahead, the future of unified communications is expected to focus on advanced observability, intelligent automation, and AI-driven analytics, all aimed at improving operational efficiency and enhancing user experience. Targeted DevOps innovations in this field have the potential to provide significant cost savings, increase reliability, and enable seamless collaboration in an increasingly connected world. This story was distributed as a release by Kashvi Pandey under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. This story was distributed as a release by Kashvi Pandey under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
