Here's an interesting announcement about IBM Lotus licensing bandwidth-management technology from Avistar to support Unified Communications. If you read this site very much at all, you see a lot of posts from John Bartlett about the bandwidth implications of videoconferencing, so I'm not surprised by an announcement like this one; in fact, I've been surprised we haven't seen bandwidth management devices/software become part of the convergence picture sooner.
Here's an interesting announcement about IBM Lotus licensing bandwidth-management technology from Avistar to support Unified Communications. If you read this site very much at all, you see a lot of posts from John Bartlett about the bandwidth implications of videoconferencing, so I'm not surprised by an announcement like this one; in fact, I've been surprised we haven't seen bandwidth management devices/software become part of the convergence picture sooner.In his post from earlier today, Matt talked about the inclusion of a voice quality management tool in Adtran's new IP telephony release. He noted, "Over the past several sessions of 'Troubleshooting the IP-PBX,' at VoiceCon, we've speculated that these tools would one day be built into the IP-PBX platform in lieu of separate appliances." This actually follows the lead of Microsoft, which used last year's VoiceCon San Francisco to announce Quality of Experience Monitoring Server, an Office Communications Server (OCS) component for near-real-time quality monitoring.
The Avistar technology is video-centric, which in itself represents an important window into IBM Lotus's UC strategy; my impression has been that IBM Lotus hasn't been pushing as hard on desktop video as Microsoft has; while at the same time they haven't gone all-in for room videoconferencing/telepresence like Cisco. They seem to be taking the unusual step of helping users ensure that the system delivers end to end before flogging the application itself.
The opposite way--applications, then management--has been the default setting for technology vendors since LANs were invented, and we're starting to see some of the stress in the voice world, where more enterprises are finding themselves challenged to deliver high-quality service as they scale their IP telephony deployments. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research gave us some good numbers to back this up during our most recent webinar (replay here). For example, Nemertes found that just under 36% of enterprises it surveyed had purchased VOIP monitoring tools at the time of deployment. Just over 20% bought the tools 1-2 years later, and the largest group, 43.6%, waited 3 years or more before buying such tools. And Robin contended that this most likely wasn't because such tools weren't needed. "There is a direct correlation between successful VOIP deployments and use of specialty management tools," she said.
Now, I've kind of mixed apples and oranges in this post--between tools that actually control bandwidth allocation dynamically, and monitoring tools that simply alert network managers to problems that the IT staff must then solve. I'd fully expect everyone to get on board with the monitoring tools, but it seems to me that there ought to be more attention paid to automated bandwidth management, especially with more video coming into the enterprise network--though I think bandwidth management tools would be important even with voice alone. Go back and read John Bartlett's posts, especially from early in the year when he was describing the problem, and you'll understand why you can't just throw bandwidth at a network problem when voice is in the mix.
That said, with video, you have the combination of much higher bandwidth demand and the vagaries of real-time traffic. If your network is going to carry these types of traffic, it needs to be built for performance.
