Proactive monitoring pays. (Here’s the proof.)
Microsoft Teams Monitoring
We’ve always known the proactive monitoring and advanced analytics provided by Martello’s Vantage DX can save organizations time and money while getting more from their investments in Microsoft Teams. We recently set out to prove that by building a research-based cost model with the help of our friends, the expert consultants at Enable UC. The results of that study were even more compelling than we expected. With Vantage DX, organizations can cut Microsoft Teams support tickets by up to 60% and reduce Teams support costs by 50–70%. Since we came out with the cost model, people have been interested to know exactly how we arrived at those numbers. So we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain Enable UC’s methodology.
Built on real-world experience
Enable UC’s lead analyst, the highly respected Microsoft MVP, Kevin Kieller, 
headed up the study. As a base for the model, he and his team started with a variation on the Microsoft Operations Framework, augmenting it with their own observations and insights from years of hands-on experience. They created lists of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks that would be typical for any organization managing Teams, and consulted with IT professionals and other Microsoft MVPs to estimate requirements, intensity, cost and other related factors. The next step was to think through the possible issues an IT department might run into while managing Teams. Kevin and his colleagues identified 11 distinct categories, covering everything from core and supporting services to hardware, software, human factors and power supplies. As a conservative estimate, the model assumes one incident per day for every 1,000 physical phones and every 50 Teams Room sessions. Since short outages don’t usually prompt people to submit tickets, the model considered an ‘incident’ to be an issue with a duration of 10 minutes or more. Even at that threshold, the model assumes only about 16% of users will actually open a ticket.
Running the numbers
Based on those assumptions, the model estimates that Teams issues affect service for one or more users 1.8% of the time. While that might seem acceptably low, Enable UC determined the associated costs are anything but. For an organization with 1,000 users across two locations and 60% remote work, that 1.8% rate adds up to a cost of $33.75 per user every month — and about $405,000 in IT team costs each year. For an organization with 10,000 users, 20 sites and just 20 remote work, the monthly per user cost is about $9.00 and the annual IT price tag over $1 million. Running the model, Enable UC found that Vantage DX delivers clear time- and money-saving benefits. Specifically, proactive monitoring means more than half (60%) of potential issues can be dealt with before an individual Teams user is affected, resulting in fewer ticket and less need for urgent troubleshooting. Vantage DX’s advanced analytics and end-to-end visibility make root cause identification and issue resolution about 50% faster.
Here’s what that looks like in the two scenarios above:
- For the organization with 1,000 users, Vantage DX cut the monthly per-user cost from $33.75 to $11.25 and overall IT costs from $405,000 to $135,000 — an operational savings of $270,000. The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) personnel required to manage Teams dropped from 2.5 to 0.6, meaning the capacity of two FTE was freed up for other, higher-value tasks.
- For the bigger sample of 10,000 users across 20 locations, using Vantage DX brought the FTE count from 7.2 to 2.1, dropped the monthly cost to just $3.38, more than halved the overall IT team expense from $1,080,000 to $405,000 — a reduction of $675,000.
What about you?
The cost model we developed with Enable UC clearly shows big savings for the exemplar organizations we defined. So what kinds of savings could it deliver for you?
