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Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC), especially the real-time applications, is unique because of user expectations. Management of UC is very important as it ensures service availability and service performance, as well as other aspects of UC including security and compliance.

“At the end of the day, the user expectation is real-time communication services are available any time all the time,” Gurmeet Lamba (News - Alert), VP R&D Unified Communications Management, OPNET told TMCnet in an exclusive interview.

For example, if your phone is not connected you can’t make a phone call. A user has an expectation that the phone should work every it’s used. If you call somebody on a cell phone, but the voice is broken, you can’t complete your conversation. In both of these cases, the service performance is not adequate and the user’s expectations are not met.

 “The reason the user expectation is so high is because it is so critical to the users living their lives,” said Dave Roberts, director of product management, Unified Communications, OPNET. “You car should start, your lights should turn on, your shower should run.”

End-to-End in UC means managing and monitoring the breadth and the depth of all components involved in orchestrating a successful communications session. To make this happen in today’s world, there are a number of components that are involved.

For instance, in order to complete a conference call, all parties phones must work, the network to the conferencing server must work, and the conferencing server itself must work properly.

End-to-end management and monitoring means getting visibility and performance of every single component involved in the complete communication session. End-to-end involves management and monitoring of every component in the breadth and the depth of the communication session. The breadth consists of the applications – unified messaging, conferencing server, devices, call management servers, etc. When it comes to the depth, components include a client such as a phone or an application on your computer, the configuration of the application, the network, the virtual server, and the physical server.

“You can see the technology stack from top to bottom and from left to right. All of it has to work,” explained Lamba. “Communication is the oil that keeps everything moving.”

When it comes to the most perfect End-to-End Management and Monitoring UC solution ever invented, Dave Roberts, director of product management, Unified Communications, OPNET, said, “The first goal would be to have 100 percent visibility to all of the information at all times. You would have to know every configuration of everything that is involved with the communication and every state of everything happening on the network at any instance. And then, it would have to have a way to correlate and use that information to do to a few things including detect problems, analyze information to find the cause of the problem, and fix the problem.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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