Again, VoiceCon had a Doctor in the house and this was Dr. Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics along with John Dunne of Prognosis and Brian Gollaher of Empirix presenting the need for network management and monitoring for the forgotten about--VOICE.Here are some notable observations:
Don't give up CDR (Call Detail Recording) or SMDR (Station Message Detailed Recording) even if ALL your telephone calls are provided FREE by any carrier. You will need them to troubleshoot IPT issues, and this information acts as historical data.
It doesn't take a lot of probes, just probes in the right places. Probes serve to perform monitoring of voice.
Management of telephony is forgotten about and when I queried the audience, only two besides myself have management and monitoring capabilities while others have IP deployments; no one raised their hand as having full IP/VoIP deployment company wide.
Voice quality or experience that is poor can derail confidence of the users, and they will turn to their cell phones--the more expensive option to making calls.
Network monitoring and management is always needed, not just the 1-2-3 approach; do an assessment (1); and then take corrective actions (2) and do another assessment; then (3) cutover/implement and do one more assessment. So deploy the right tools (network monitoring and management) upfront. I cited an example of surveys we conducted over ten years ago of 450 IP-PBX dealers that were losing money after year 1 of cutovers. Why? They did not have the tools to perform network monitoring and management; there were some available at huge price points.
I also asked the audience if they know their company's cost for downtime or for disruption such as "voice" quality is too poor to use. No one responded as knowing. I do know the recent unexpected snow in the U.K. has folks placing the costs of downtime at £1B.
Some new information from the attendees and speakers stirred the pot--here are the questions:
* How can we use network monitoring and management to enforce SLAs and recoup costs/penalties? * Is there a sliding degree of proactiveness vs reactiveness with these tools?
One attendee doesn't want to pay for network monitoring and management of their carrier; this is understandable. How can you make the carrier accountable without the tools? Then, is it possible that enterprise only needs the tools at certain places?
I think in summary, Brian's initial questions that everyone needs to be able to address before they deploy IPT are:
* How do I know I have a problem?
* What's wrong and how do I fix it?
* How do we get to the root cause?
Unless you have the tools, then the answers are pretty clear--you won't. I think the speakers brought some new thoughts to the table. IPT is challenging and sooner or later someone's going to have to pay to play. A longstanding question I've pondered--who should pay; the users; the manufacturer of the goods; the MSP; the VAR/Dealer/Interconnect? Call quality and availability of resources are required and if anyone remembers the days of the Dimension PBXs--not having enough DTMF registers meant you could lock up the PBX and make a lot of users angry. Today, we need DSPs and IP addresses large enough to fill the pools. Three speakers have told us what we need and why we need what we need. Maybe we need lessons on how to cost justify the tools or methods and strategies in approaching management. It would be nice to hear from user companies that have deployed the tools and I don't mean carriers or MSPs--they should already have these tools.
