Multi-vendor IP telephony management: challenges and solutions

An increasing number of enterprises are faced with the challenge of supporting and maintaining IP telephony systems from multiple IP-PBX vendors, such as Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. These companies have a variety of reasons for their mixed vendor environment - some by accident and some by design.

For large enterprises, the multiplicity of tools and teams required to maintain, monitor and manage the multi-vendor IP telephony environment creates the biggest challenge. Ultimately, it comes down to efficiency and economics.

This paper examines the increasing occurrence of multi-vendor IP telephony environments and the present day challenges of using multiple tools to manage them. It offers a strategy for evaluating IP telephony management options and concludes with the over-arching benefits of a single management tool for multi-vendor IP-PBX environments.