Managing UC means delivering streaming video fluidly, transmitting voice with clarity, moving IM's briskly, and sending emails promptly. Use these three tips to achieve the high performance end-users expect. See the Entire Network and UC Environment UC is a diverse mix of services running in a shared network environment where apps and communications interact together. It requires a monitoring solution set that provides total visibility and analysis of UC services and the overall IT environment. ...

Defining unified communications is more complicated than it seems, but a thorough understanding of UC technology is required before informed buying decisions can be made. Not only is the UC value proposition difficult to articulate, but it involves multiple decisions that impact both the IT group and end users. In brief, UC is a platform that seamlessly integrates communications applications across multiple modes -- such as voice, data and video -- and delivers a consistent end-user experience a...

Industry Analysts say that approximately 85% of today’s networks will require voip quality testing upgrades to their data networks to properly support high-quality VoIP and video traffic. Organizations are always looking for a way to reduce costs, and that’s why they often try to deploy VoIP by switching voice traffic over to a LAN or WAN links. In a lot of cases the data networks which the business has chosen handle VoIP traffic accordingly, generally speaking voice traffic is uniquely time sen...

Managing VoIP quality is a constant headache for engineers. Here are some ways to avoid some common problems. While VoIP has been considered mainstream in the enterprise for the past couple of years, network engineers still face a challenge to ensure consistent VoIP quality. Unplanned or surprise changes to the network can leave end users unhappy and administrators scratching their heads. Even the smallest configuration and setting changes have the potential to immediately and adversely impact a...

Industry Analysts say that approximately 85% of today’s networks will require upgrades to their data networks to properly support high-quality VoIP and video traffic. Organizations are always looking for a way to reduce costs, and that’s why they often try to deploy VoIP by switching voice traffic over to a LAN or WAN links. In a lot of cases the data networks which the business has chosen cannot handle VoIP traffic accordingly, generally speaking voice traffic is uniquely time sensitive, it can...

The Biggest Videoconferencing Challenge? Real-Time Performance Management Did you know that according to Enterprise Management Associates EMA™ analysts, 95 percent of organizations have VoIP on their network – and more than half have deployed videoconferencing? IP videoconferencing has strong appeal to businesses through its promise of significant cost and time savings. But how simple is the transition to video? For end users, video communications are expected to be smooth, seamless, and simple....

VoIP Management Overview There are any number of VoIP management solutions available in today’s market place. However, when you start to drill-­down into the capabilities of these tools they tend to focus on the performance elements of your network infrastructure and associated VoIP metrics (e.g. RTT, RTD\Latency, Packet Loss, Jitter, Moss, R-­‐Factor etc.) , assumptions are made on infrastructure and fault management being in place, so it is vitally important to assess the complete picture of y...

When it comes to ensuring consistent VoIP quality, what you don’t know can hurt you. Surprise changes to the network can leave end users unhappy and administrators scratching their heads. Even the smallest configuration and settings changes can have the potential to immediately and adversely impact applications. They can also be difficult to troubleshoot. To locate the source of any VoIP problem, it’s important to understand how critical changes in configuration, codecs, and user behavior can ki...

The cost and efficiency benefits promised in business VoIP have led to widespread adoption among small businesses and enterprises alike. While advancements have been made in this technology area, there are still obstacles to quality of service (QoS) in the delivery of business VoIP. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of these obstacles and best practices for breaking through these barriers to improve overall quality. According to an Internet Evolution article, the main obstacles to QoS in business...

Every year, I survey a couple hundred IT professionals on a variety of topics, including what their organization wants to improve on over the next year. It is not at all surprising that the task that is typically at the top of the list is rapidly identifying the root cause of degraded application performance. What is somewhat surprising however is that for the last several years, managing VoIP has been very close to the top of the list. Although VoIP has been deployed heavily over the last few y...

Hosted Unified Communications is a mission critical application for most businesses. Few can continue to operate effectively if all communications are down. Therefore, it is extremely important that the selected service provider follow certain best practices that ensure the availability of the service. There are many best practices that a hosted service provider should follow, but these are my Top 5: 1. Reliable Network and Software Infrastructure A good way to deliver the availability character...

When tracking user experience in Unified Communications (UC) applications, like VoIP and videoconferencing, the accuracy of analysis hinges upon your ability to capture, integrate, and analyze multiple data streams that make up a call session including: Control management setup of the conversation Audio and video streams traversing between the callers Protocols used for managing the transfer of audio and video The primary challenge is that network teams lack visibility into call traffic as it tr...

The principles of managing VoIP performance The use of VoIP in the corporate world is growing rapidly, driven by a combination of increasingly mature technology and a desire to reduce costs. A single network infrastructure should enable organizations to reduce capital expenditure and create a more homogeneous environment that is easier to maintain, monitor and manage. However, using the network to transport voice as well as data naturally reduces the amount of traffic it can support. Moving to V...

Unified communications is on the move. The unified communications (UC) segment is forecast to grow from $22.8 billion in 2011 to $61.9 billion by 2018, according to Transparency Market Research. UC is viewed by businesses of all sizes as a way to cut costs and improve both productivity and collaboration. It cuts costs by using the latest Internet technologies instead of more costly solutions such as traditional corporate video conferencing solutions, and it boosts productivity by reducing the nu...

Not so long ago, Sci-Fi movies liked to depict calls completed through a computer connection. Whether upon a spaceship light years away or from a government-protected entity to help save the world, this futuristic way of staying connected had us all intrigued. While we haven’t yet reached the Jetsons’ level of flying cars and automatic meals (I’m still hoping for the development on this one) we are making calls over the Internet, with a computer, mobile or standard phone. Business phone systems ...

Unified Communications (UC) is the integration of real-time and non-real time communication to provide instant and on-demand services to customers. During the last few years, UC has seen enormous growth due to the increasing use of UC by businesses around the world. A report by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) shows that UC is likely to grow at an annual rate of 32.7 percent per year through 2017 in North America alone. It is being used for many applications such as hosted services, voice cal...

While UC enhances business processes, it can overwhelm networks when application performance isn’t closely monitored. Any performance delay will be immediately noticeable to the user. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW Organizations are always looking for ways to cut expenses. This is particularly true in the current economic climate. Unified communications (UC) represent an appealing alternative to traditional communication processes due to the potential savings once they are implemented. As more companies ...

The Coming Wave of IP-based Live Videoconferencing The future of all telecommunications is undoubtedly IP-based. Voice over IP (VoIP) is now considered mainstream within enterprise organizations, and a growing number are embracing the next phase of this evolutionary track by deploying IP-based live video communications. IP videoconferencing has strong appeal – it can effectively deliver ever-important direct and interactive human communications that typically occur only during face-to-face meeti...

One of the more popular developments happening in IT departments worldwide is the growth of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions. The cost-savings from integrating the many disparate communications software and hardware pieces typically found in a large organization is too compelling to ignore. But there is a danger in underestimating the effort needed to roll out a UCC implementation that runs smoothly and efficiently. One could watch Michael Jordan and marvel at how he made...

The Biggest Videoconferencing Challenge? Real-Time Performance Management Did you know that according to Enterprise Management Associates EMA analysts, 95 percent of organizations have VoIP on their network- and more than half have deployed videoconferencing? IP videoconferencing has strong appeal to businesses through its promise of significant cost and time savings. But how simple is the transition to video? For end users, video communications are expected to be smooth, seamless, and simple. F...