Communications and Technology Industry Research

As I made my year-end visits to key customers and prospects last December, almost every person I met was working on his or her 2008 IT operations budget. Even though it appears the U.S. economy is on the cusp of a recession, no one I saw used the three little words that technology vendors like myself dread to hear — “IT budget slash.“ Instead, most people talked about keeping a fairly steady course. But as usual, they all noted they were expected to achieve more with any budget monies they planned to spend this year.

 

These sentiments are echoed in a recent Gartner (News - Alert) survey of 1,500 CIOs that was publicized in January. Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP, made this comment about the survey results: “CIOs are now expected to deliver the solutions that make the enterprise different in a way that matters to company performance and customer satisfaction. That is a tall order.“ In fact, IT budgets are expected to be higher at companies that are looking to provide “distinctive solutions,“ increasing by close to 5 percent over last year, while generic IT budgets are predicted to rise only a modest 3.1 percent.

 

With the emphasis on “strategic IT,“ it’s more important than ever for CIOs and IT operations personnel to figure out smart ways of lowering the “keeping-the-lights-on“ costs while at the same time allocating funds to higher priority endeavors.

 

For a number of our prospects, the Holy Grail of strategic voice-over-IP (VoIP) projects is the initiative to migrate their enterprises to fixed-mobile convergence (FMC). Mobility is one important way that customers are looking to both improve their business processes and build customer satisfaction — the top two ranking business priorities in the Gartner CIO survey. FMC also can save enterprises considerable long-term costs by consolidating voice and data on a single, IP-based infrastructure.

 

Yet in practice, of the 80 percent of enterprises that have deployed VoIP, only a meager six percent have done so throughout their enterprise, according to Yankee Group (News - Alert) (U.S. Economics of IP Communications Survey, May 2007). Why? IT operations personnel know that getting a handle on the management of fixed voice is hard enough, so they loathe tackling the more complex tasks of managing mobile VoIP and other applications when they prioritize their budgets. The Gartner CIO survey relates that “networking voice and data“ fall to seventh place in terms of top technology priorities for 2008.

 

This is, unfortunately, a very common disconnect. Enterprise IT innovation is often trumped by harsh support issues that can consume the majority of day-to-day support and troubleshooting time and radically eat into IT budgets. For IT to focus on “making a difference,“ operational reality has to match the promise of technology.

 

With VoIP, operational personal must take the risks of moving from a deterministic, always available, standalone voice utility to a dynamic IP-based voice service that shares networking resources with all corporate applications and thus is potentially fraught with performance and availability issues. When they make the next step to mobility with FMC, support issues become even more complex. And IT operations personnel know that when VoIP and other mobile applications don’t work as well as users expect, they will get the complaint calls.

 

Here are some of the key areas of concern for supporting VoIP and FMC services:

 

The reality is, the entire FMC ecosystem can affect the performance of real-time applications: the networking infrastructure, user behavior, or a problem with one the component applications, such as the call signaling or the RTP voice stream. Even knowing where to start in this complex web is a challenge for network operations; it can often take them days or weeks to locate and identify the target problem.

 

New technology is now available that uses flow-based information and identity mapping to pinpoint endpoint and application problems in real-time. This technology analyzes the application behavior of all the IP phones, call managers, and voicemail systems deployed across the enterprise, looking at traditional performance variables like packet rate and bit rate, but also at affinities to specific applications, periods of times and other endpoints. It also discovers hidden problems that often plague IT: bad policy, unsupported applications, rogue endpoints, and excessive application use.

 

Armed with this “big picture“ of the FMC application experience, the technology then correlates and analyzes all the FMC issues with other symptoms experienced on the infrastructure to determine a single specific problem source. This information helps network operations personnel determine exactly who “owns“ the problem, so they can escalate the issue to the right group for resolution. The result is actionable information about the source of the core problem that enables VoIP services to be quickly restored to normal quality levels.

 

If IT organizations can quickly get to the heart of complex problems that affect real-time application performance, they can feel more confident in their ability to maintain mission-critical VoIP support throughout the enterprise, and make the move to FMC a higher priority. Removing operational barriers to making VoIP a strategic initiative will also reduce OPEX (News - Alert) to help “recession proof“ IT budgets.

 

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