I was talking with Joe Frost of Psytechnics, about the quality-monitoring company's future directions, and Joe said that they're focusing on monitoring of video endpoints, and that they're not seeing much reason to get into the business of QOS monitoring for Unified Communications endpoints.
Joe said Psytechnics could do UC endpoint monitoring, but "no one would buy that." There's just not enough of a UC endpoint market yet.
In contrast, Psytechnics is definitely seeing a market for videoconferencing monitoring endpoints. Which tells you two things:
Since monitoring and management deployment always lags the deployment of the technologies it monitors and manages, it seems fair to conclude that this is another marker of videoconferencing being for real. And that enterprises may be becoming less inclined to settle for inadequate quality in their video deployments.
In some ways, I think videoconferencing quality is going to be even more of a pressing issue than voice quality. Yes, the PSTN and legacy PBXs taught people to expect very high voice quality, and they're not going to like it if IP-PBXs have problems. But I have to wonder--if a user's voice quality is sub-par but not unintelligible, and only sporadically, will they actually take the time to complain to someone about it, or just chalk it up to the general decline of voice quality in almost all types of communications (especially cell phones)?
Quality problems with video are harder to ignore, because they're video: because people have become as used to watching high-quality video as they are at hearing high-quality telephony audio; because videoconferences happen in rooms full of people, many of whom have a stake in the video's quality not being a source of embarrassment to them; and last but not least, because videoconferencing systems range from expensive to really expensive.
I'll soon be posting a podcast I just finished with Psytechnics' Mike Hollier, and Mike made an interesting point about monitoring voice quality. According to Mike, the vast majority of problems that are discovered with voice quality relate to "analog" factors--things like echo or gateway settings and the like. Relatively little is the fault of the network.
Which doesn't mean you can ignore the network. And given the higher bandwidth demands of video, the relative importance of the network is likely to rise. Your choice there is likely to be either to throw lots of bandwidth at video, or maybe even do an overlay network or managed service with service level agreements (SLAs).
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