While I'm on the subject of test tools, this blog by Terry Slattery of Chesapeake Netcraftsmen helps make the point about monitoring and test tools.Terry starts with a demonstration of a problem known as a spanning tree loop, which is an issue with the underlying network, then ties in the voice component:
In a network supporting VoIP, you should understand the process used by phones to power-up, register, and operate. You can use the OSI model to segregate problems into physical layer, data link layer, network layer, and application layer. Knowing the types of problems at each layer allows you to quickly identify a few troubleshooting tasks to perform to identify the source of a problem. example is one-way audio; think about how you would diagnose its cause and how you might fix it.
This is on the "plumbing" level, but it's never "just plumbing." Oddly enough, Terry's blog also shows how there's almost an inversion going on in the value proposition, which is something I was talking with Sorell Slaymaker about yesterday when he dropped by our office.
In the pre-VOIP days, the IT side dominated the telecom side; networking was seen as high-value, telephony as hardware-centric, punch-down-board-oriented, commoditized utility service. Now, in a sense, the roles have become reversed. There's not much new under the sun when it comes to IP networking, but voice running on top of that IP network is a high-value application. It's a higher order of technical issue, as this blog by Terry Slattery shows, and then of course communications as an application that integrates with business processes is yet another, still-higher layer of value-add to the network.
And yes, there's a lot of new activity around the network--virtualization and the cloud chief among them--but I'd argue these have more to do with where the networking function resides, not how it's done and what skills are required to do it. And the architectures that virtualization and the cloud enable--chiefly centralization--in turn create new challenges for making communications run on top of the network.
So communications is a multi-layered challenge for the enterprise, one that has to be addressed at the tools layer as well as at the higher level.
