Since September, voice management company Tone Software (News - Alert) has been taking to the Web to dissect some of the most pressing issues surrounding the industry. Amit Kapoor, Tone Software's Director of Strategic Technology Advancement, first took a stab at MOS (Mean Opinon Score) a few weeks ago, then UC operations a few weeks later and, this week, Kapoor has decided to dive into the complexities surrounding UC monitoring and management.
In a blog entry titled “The Importance of UC Monitoring and Management to Organizations,” Kapoor details why organizations are even more concerned with ensuring compatibility and interoperability of the UC vendor technologies than they are with real-time performance.
According to a recent Gartner (News - Alert) study published in September 2011 called “Survey Analysis: Top Five Challenges When Migrating Your Unified Communications Infrastructure Into Your Data Center,” organizations face key challenges when it comes to adopting UC technologies into the data center. The Gartner study spanned eight countries and over 100 organizations per country with a minimum of 1000 employees per organization and Gartner findings quantify the end-user importance of real-time visibility into the UC environment, Kapoor said.
“When discussing Unified Communications (News - Alert), we refer to all the voice, video, collaboration, mobility, and integration to the enterprise application technologies,” he wrote. “The nature of real-time applications requires a level of tolerance within the data network that has been previously unneeded for pure data center needs.”
Kapoor noted that: voice requires low latency and low packet loss level; video requires higher bandwidth, low latency and low packet loss levels; and both voice and video requires five nines availability.
According to Kapoor, Gartner’s study indicates that end users have real business value for real-time visibility over this environment. Moreover, the study reports that OPEX (News - Alert) savings were ranked second in business value and as one of the key drivers to migrating UC to the data center.
“As I look back at the corollaries of VoIP adoption over a decade ago and UC adoption trends occurring today, it’s evident that end-user prudence in incorporating new technologies has increased,” Kapoor writes. “When VoIP was first introduced into the enterprise domain, monitoring and management was generally considered an afterthought. Too often we heard stories of lack of visibility to the data network, TCP versus UDP (News - Alert) level analysis, active versus passive testing, etc…”
“Today, the findings from Gartner shows approximately 39 percent of respondents recognizing that investment in management tools will be the second largest impact to UC,” he added. “As we see the growing trend of investments within both the large enterprise and SMB space for UC technologies, Gartner’s findings truly shows the need for utilizing the most applicable tools to manage the UC environment.”
To read more of Kapoor’s thoughts on this topic, click here.
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Rich Steeves