Changing Your Enterprise Communications? Start With a Traffic Analysis
September 08, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
Many companies today are investing in unified communications to enable better enterprise collaboration in a multichannel communications environment. It helps them save money, gain features such as conferencing and document sharing, and open up the company telecom environment to remote, home-based and road-based workers. There are, however, a lot of UC choices available today, and they can becoming overwhelming for companies that don’t understand what their precise needs are, or what their network will support.
Experts recommend that, after you make a list of your organization’s communications needs, you engage in a full-scale traffic analysis. A traffic analysis uses the call details produced by the existing telephone system to pinpoint actual call traffic. This helps identify peak hours and carrier-independent traffic patterns and provides an organization with metrics to right-size trunk resources, ensuring that they can make the most of their communications infrastructure. Without it, companies wind up guessing at trunk circuit or bandwidth requirements, and they’re often catastrophically wrong. The usage-based metrics that a traffic analysis can provide simply helps companies make better decisions about any new purchases or changes to their communications systems, according to a recent blog post by Darlene Jackson of ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement Solutions, Inc.
“With a traffic analysis, you will optimize the network by getting an accurate picture that details the trunks, hubs, routers, devices, services, and/or operating costs needed to carry out your business with peak performance,” wrote Jackson. “You will also be able to eliminate spending for network related assets that are no longer necessary.”
For companies that may need traffic analysis only very occasionally, some providers offer it as a service rather than a premise-based solution. This ensures that organizations engaging in traffic analysis only once – or once a year – aren’t laying down capital for a solution they don’t need (or don’t need very often).
“This approach makes the option affordable to even small to medium sized businesses, while providing critical information required to properly complete the assessment,” wrote Jackson. “Although short-term snapshots are an option, the longer the analysis, the more panoramic the views of your traffic patterns; revealing more opportunities to fine-tune and optimize.”
Enterprises today waste a lot of money on redundant, unused, outdated or duplicate telecom resources. The opportunity to save money by identifying peak usage (concurrent call paths, peak hours and call volume), network inefficiencies, existing network capacity and security problems should be welcomed by any organization with high telecom bills.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi