The Future of IP Communications? UC, UC, UC!

Founded in 1988, Sydney, Australia-based Integrated Research (News - Alert) (the company behind PROGNOSIS) has a twenty-year heritage of providing performance monitoring and diagnostics software solutions for business-critical computing environments around the globe.

 

Since 2000, PROGNOSIS has also been used to manage large-scale Cisco (News - Alert) IP telephony networks, enabling organizations to optimize call quality and service reliability. The addition of support for Avaya and Nortel platforms makes PROGNOSIS a suitable choice solution for enterprises and service providers with a large number of endpoints or systems from multiple vendors.

 

TMCnet caught up with Mike Goodman, Product Marketing Manager of PROGNOSIS, who shared his insights into what’s going on with the company as they head into 2009. Goodman feels that unified communications is going to play a significant role in the future of IP communications.

 

MG: It was a great year from a product point of view. We added Nortel (News - Alert) support to our existing Cisco and Avaya IP telephony monitoring products for service providers and large enterprises. We also made major enhancements to our IP telephony reporting software.

 

It has been a mixed bag on the revenue front. Our U.S. operations posted 21% growth over the prior year when we closed our fiscal year back in July. Since then, the current economic situation has emerged, and one obvious impact is the consolidation of many of our large customers — especially in the finance industry.

 

MG: Our continued growth and partnering with service providers. This year we saw an increase in companies turning to service providers for management of their IP telephony service.

 

Nemertes Research recently reported that 33% of the companies they survey now use service providers to manage their IP telephony environment — up from just six percent in 2005. This jumps to 60% for small to medium sized businesses.

 

We believe service providers are well positioned in the current economic slowdown, where low capital budgets and hiring freezes are causing companies to turn to third parties to fill their operational gaps.

 

MG: Lots of movement on the product front. We’re aiming to make some significant product announcements around the March timeframe, so watch this space! In addition, we’ll take greater focus on developing new market opportunities through channel partners and service providers, along with delivering innovative features and new vendor version support for our global customer base.

 

MG: Being an Australian, I’m somewhat under-qualified to comment. From what I’ve seen, the extensive use of technology during the presidential campaign and the fact that the new administration plans to appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a sign that they will be tech-friendly. We’ll have to wait and see what that equates to in terms of policy.

 

MG: UC, UC, UC! While there are a lot of possible directions, there’s no doubt unified communications will play a major role in the future of our industry. As a management software vendor, we’re working with customers and industry experts to determine what we need to do to best meet the emerging management needs of UC. It’s also highly likely that there will be continued adoption of service providers for management IP telephony — and this should spread into unified communications as management software vendors and service providers build out offerings to meet customer demand.

 

MG: Without doubt, the market conditions will cause many projects to be reevaluated or put in hold. It will also place a much greater focus on the financial impact of any project on an organization’s bottom line.

 

Another consideration is mergers and acquisitions. The current situation will result in many of our customers having to amalgamate different technologies into newly formed organizations, and then have to find ways to monitor and manage these disparate systems efficiently. This plays well for us as our IP telephony monitoring software offers a single view into multiple IP telephony vendors (Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert), Nortel).

 

Additionally, I suspect that flat or reduced IT budgets and hire freezes will continue to make service providers more appealing. With this we anticipate good growth with our service provider customers.

 

MG: Number one would be that we are a “specialized” IP telephony monitoring solution, so data is gathered, graphically displayed and reported in ways that make sense to telephony people — rather than IP network or simple event-centric information. Secondly, PROGNOSIS is designed to meet the needs of large enterprises and service providers — typically 2,500 to hundreds of thousands of phones. And lastly, PROGNOSIS offers support for multiple IP telephony vendor technology — giving a single view into Cisco, Avaya and Nortel environments.

MG: This may be an obvious assumption, but I suspect that consolidation of systems and network management software vendors is on the cards, with mergers and acquisitions likely through the next year and a sharp increase in companies outsourcing their IP telephony management to Managed Service Providers.