Knowledge is power. At no time in human history has this been truer than today’s global commune. The earth has suddenly become one gigantic commune, thanks to the combined reality of the internet, traditional and social media.

Yet, a world of frequent information overload doesn’t directly translate to information you can use to enhance your life and work. And any business, merely by its operation, will generate information at every segment, be it production, marketing, distribution, sales and very crucially, customer services. As the world is constantly being populated with information, businesses need to protect the data in the communication systems, so that they are understood, useable and open up insights into the workforce activities, business methods and needs of the unified communication structure.

The question arises: is there a way all this information can be gathered, analyzed and harnessed and applied for greater efficiency and ultimately, to meet business objectives?

Analytics supplies a “yes” to these questions. The process has been in use in business since the management exercises were put into place by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century. It however began to command more attention in the late 1960s when computers were used in support systems for business decisions. Since then, analytics have changed and formed with the development of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data warehouses, and a large number of other software tools and processes.

Companies across the globe have been applying analytics to a vast range of business data generated within and outside their operations to describe, predict and improve business performance.

In Nigeria, multinationals, large corporates, few medium-sized and even relatively small companies have also made a place for the use of analytics in their operations.

But a larger percentage of business establishments are yet to key in to the necessity of analytics in measuring ROI in a substantive way.

This reluctance may be attributed to inadequate awareness or the fact that some firms employing analytics have to contend with platforms and other clunky hardware which make for a less than seamless process.

Many of these organisations using analytics need an application that compares usage pattern and trends across different Unified Communication (UC) platforms.

Information and Technology firms have thus, continued to research on designing products that can provide an all-in-one analytics and UC solutions station for any the different sizes of firms with different sizes of data.

Just recently, Dell Software, the software division of the technologies giant, Dell Incorporated, introduced the Unified Communications (UC) Command Suite 8.1 to the market.

The application adds analytics reporting for Office 365 for Exchange Online and Cisco Unified Communications Manager to Dell’s cross-platform analytics and diagnostics solution.

Dell’s Suite 8.1 is also the market’s only solution to offer analytics and diagnostics across both Microsoft Exchange and Lync, and also expand an organisation’s capability to harness the valuable intelligence in its unified communications systems to increase user productivity, encourage adoption, protect sensitive information, increase ROI (Return on Investment), and plan for future growth and migrations.

With the looming end of support for Windows Server 2003, increased adoption of Office 365, and Exchange 2016 on the horizon, organisations are seriously considering multi-UC platform migration paths that will support evolving business needs and better prepare for future growth.

The latest UC Command Suite delivers accurate insights into various UC communication platforms where it is already deployed – including offices, departments, and cities using specific platform features – to help businesses determine where to increase investment and where to eliminate platforms not being used.

These insights help organisations better prioritise, anticipate capacity planning for the future environment, and enforce better communications and data loss prevention policies.

The entrance of Dell’s latest Suite will no doubt bring a sigh of relief to organisations who invest heavily in unified communications and typically have a variety of systems in place across the organisation, yet lack accurate insight into who is using which platform, or how it’s being used, resulting in lost productivity, increased support man-hours and millions of naira in software platform costs and renewals.

So whether large-sized or small, or somewhere in the middle, locally-based firms stand to reap great benefits by having Dell’s UC Command Suite 8.1 take all their business data and transform them into templates for improved output in production, marketing, distribution and yes, customer services that will ensure they keep the edge on the competition.

Business in Nigeria should never be the same again.