Integrated Research's Dr Fiona Lodge presents on IP Telephony

Emerging Trends in IP Telephony Management

This session was designed to help attendees understand how to manage voice traffic across a data
network, including an insight into tools and metrics that inform a company about the performance of voice on the network, and how to remotely manage network elements.

Firstly, Fiona presented that as organizations mature, they are moving away from using general network management or standard IP PBX vendor tools, to adopting best-of-breed IP telephony specific tools integrated to suit the companies’ operational support processes. She differentiated the various tools used between the Business Service, Application and Network layers of the environment.

Fiona also expanded on the growing trend to outsource the management of all or part of the environment. Outsourcing saw a significant growth in more mature rollouts moving from 6% in 2006 to 14% in 2007. More companies are moving to managed services as their IP telephony environment grows, gets too complex and becomes too resource intensive affecting other initiatives. Managed
Service Providers (MSPs) can afford the best tools and offer cost effective 24x7 support.

In concluding, Fiona said that with the market maturing so was the need for operational best practice and the IP telephony specialty tools to support and maintain robust high quality telephony service.

Troubleshooting IP Telephony Networks

This session looked at how to trace the problem when voice service degrades or fails. And how do you even begin to determine what's going on when voice is embedded in other applications. It covered the
latest tools and technologies for troubleshooting converged networks--how and when to perform rootcause analysis, how to measure, monitor and manage voice quality on an ongoing basis, and how to use the data generated by monitoring and management systems to get an overall picture of the network's health, and the voice application's behavior. Fiona’s presentation also discussed the complexities arising from the increasingly common trend of outsourcing. The handover between domains of operational responsibility within large distributed enterprises with different helpdesk, operations teams and outsourced WANs, can add significant overhead to troubleshooting times. In conclusion she discussed how integrating Best of Breed management tools with operational support processes can minimize mean-time-to-repair by up to 90% compared with an environment without any management tools.