Call less voip

Service providers are beginning to recognize the importance of VoIP management as an important element of their long-term VoIP investment.

Make no mistake: For some carriers there is a true "disconnect" between the two areas due to poor planning.

In fact, recent discussions with enterprise telecom managers indicate that VoIP Quality of Service (QoS) and security are critical concerns that must be solved before large scale VoIP service adoption occurs. During the next three years, enterprises will assess their VoIP requirements including business need and impact, costs and technical staffing. Many will turn to outsourcing because of the high level of complexity. To seize this opportunity, carriers must better understand the importance of managing VoIP.

BOLSTERING CAPABILITY

Carriers must increase their management capabilities to allay enterprise concerns about service quality, reliability, and security. To meet these requirements, service providers and carriers should analyze tools from companies such as Brix Networks, Concord Communications, Micromuse, and SMARTs that test and manage QoS, performance and availability VOIP metrics. The products vary in cost and capability, but all perform basic QoS analysis that improves service reliability and performance.

To get started, carriers should analyze their business and customer requirements; determine key performance and QoS metrics; and create a short list of vendors that meet these areas. Long-term, strategic planning should also be considered for the project as data collection and the value of the data can improve operations and customer relationships. For example, certain carriers are considering presenting parsed data statistics to VoIP customers through their customer portal as a way to demonstrate real-time quality and performance.

STRATEGIC INVESTMENT

AT&T, SBC Communications, and Verizon excel at managing VoIP services. These companies considered VoIP management early in the planning cycle as a strategic part of their customer investment. While operationally centric, it was customer demand and the importance of building trust in service delivery and reliability that drove budget allocation.

CREATING ADVANTAGES

Executives used to believe that VoIP management technologies would enable future customers to see QoS and performance metrics via customer portals to improve support for service level metrics. Besides technology, their IT organizations streamlined workflows and processes to respond more efficiently to customer VoIP demands and catch problems before downtime occurred. As a result, these carriers have a competitive advantage and are demonstrating the importance of managing VoIP--and the customer value that management tools provide for enterprise VoIP quality requirements.

Without VoIP management, carriers are simply flying blind and limiting their sales opportunities. Enterprises will not accept VOIP services that lack management, show poor quality and cannot be tracked to service level metrics. Some specific required QoS metrics include MOS generation, jitter, latency, call completion and quality, and voice quality.

Enterprises today want to understand the delivery infrastructure, network management and security of VoIP services before they sign the contract. Expect integration points to be extensive and in constant flux as business requirements force change.

Establishing trust and extending your relationships with enterprises takes time and money. Anything less and the competitive nature of this market will destroy competitive advantage and a carrier's opportunity to drive VoIP revenue.

Stephen Elliot is a telecommunications analyst with IDC. To respond to this article, please send a message to: lettertoeditor@advanstar.com