Voice Management

Imagine what this means for IT teams, to make sure all these parts work together and that the best voice management and quality are still guaranteed. As Kapoor sees it, operation teams need two things to manage this challenge: visibility and metrics.

Kapoor notes that VoIP and UC are “highly dependent on the underlying network they traverse,” which means “voice quality and service issues are often caused by a variety of network-related conditions.”

Therefore, when problems occur, pity the poor support team working in such a heterogeneous tech environment having to get data from multiple sources and locations routers, gateways, VoIP call servers and UC applications to determine from where the problem originated. As Kapoor says, what’s needed is end-to-end visibility “across every facet of the communications environment, from the SIP trunks at the core to the softphones at the edge.”

Still, there will be issues. Voice traffic will suffer from latency, delay and packet loss, and quality will suffer. What’s needed here, Kapoor says, are “voice-specific metrics that provide clear insight into ‘why’ quality.” This requires “deep VoIP-specific metrics, such as burst, length and density on a per-call basis, to determine the type of voice issue occurring.”

The bottom line, as Kapoor sees it, is that with unified visibility of the entire environment and deep voice metrics, “the complexity of determining where and why communications issues are occurring is significantly reduced.”

Recently voice management leader Tone Software announced that its ReliaTel VoIP management offering is compliant with key Internet Protocol telephony offerings from Avaya (News - Alert), a vendor of business collaboration systems, software and services.

 The ReliaTel offering provides comprehensive VoIP quality and service level management for converged environments, including real time VoIP QoS and QoE analysis and trunk performance reporting for Avaya Communications Manager through the SAT interface. The ReliaTel RTCP, SNMP, and SAT functionality is now compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with:  Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0.