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Network General Surveys Leading IT Professionals To Identify Issues Hampering VoIP In The Enterprise

VoIP and data applications competing for bandwidth result in poor network performance

SAN JOSE, CALIF., SEPTEMBER 12, 2005 Network General today released survey findings that revealed that the management of VoIP is causing enterprise IT serious difficulty.  Nearly half of IT managers surveyed discovered that both VoIP and data applications were frequently competing for bandwidth, resulting in degradation of overall network performance.

The Network General survey, conducted by leading industry research firm Enterprise Management Associates, polled senior IT executives in 100 companies across North America actively involved in VoIP deployments.  The survey focused on companies using VoIP as their primary voice communication system (nearly 60 percent of respondents), and about 50 percent of those have been using VoIP for more than a year.

As businesses deploy VoIP and other vital applications, they are faced with poor application performance.  Business critical applications, such as VoIP, CRM and ERP, sit on the network and compete for bandwidth, said Vice President Dennis Drogseth, Enterprise Management Associates.  To solve this problem, businesses need to invest in enterprise network and application performance monitoring and analysis solutions so they can determine the performance impact of these data applications on VoIP, and vice versa.

VoIP management solutions must be able to proactively identify how well networks carrying both voice and data traffic are operating, and where potential problems lie, before they affect a companys ability to conduct business over the phone.  

The quality of network traffic and security are the primary concerns for businesses that have deployed VoIP solutions. Businesses used to be focused on how VoIP would reduce costs; now IT managers are thinking about how VoIP will affect network traffic and the performance of existing applications, said EVP Ken Boyd, Product Management, Network General.  Once this hurdle is overcome, the industry will see rapid adoption of full-scale VoIP deployments in the enterprise.

With nearly two decades of experience in network management, Network General uniquely understands the challenge of managing converged voice/data networks.   Network Generals Sniffer Voice solution:

• Identifies VoIP users and service components, such as call managers, gateways and IP phones.
• Monitors VoIP activity, performance, real VoIP data flow and VoIP service degradation.
• Measures the interaction of VoIP and non-VoIP applications, leveraging Network Sniffer Application Intelligence, an add-on module for Sniffer Distributed that provides a business-centric view into network applications and reduces risks associated with the deployment and maintenance of key applications.  Network General solutions also measure the performance degradation of VoIP from non-VoIP applications.
• Manages real-time VoIP performance with notifications and alarms for problematic VoIP calls.
• Resolves VoIP call control and voice/video transport quality issues.

Since the majority of IT managers surveyed indicated they are bound to VoIP service level agreements (SLAs), its no surprise that nearly 90 percent of them confirm that VoIP performance monitoring, analysis, and reporting capabilities are either critical or very important to ensure continued optimal performance of VoIP across the extended enterprise. 

In fact, application problems are the single largest source of downtime for corporate networks.  Businesses constantly complain of inexplicable outages, frustrating lag times and the inability of applications to support multiple end users. As a result, they often pay service-level agreement (SLA) penalties that sometimes exceed $20,000 a month.  

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