Research analysts, vendors and the media have been touting the growth of the voice over IP (VoIP) market and the value inherent in voice applications for some time. In fact, the Yankee Group earlier this year stated that they see the business VoIP market reaching $3.3 billion in service revenue by 2010.

There is a lot of hype around this technology, and deservedly so, but from a user perspective, VoIP is getting a less-than-stellar reputation. If you look beyond high-profile implementations and examine most IT organizations, there is a hesitance to move from the project stage to deploying VoIP enterprisewide because there is so much at stake if something goes wrong—many businesses can’t afford any network downtime due to bandwidth drain.

Is this a case of industry watchers and vendors over-inflating facts and stretching the truth? Not really. The fact is that while VoIP is a technology whose time really has come, there is a perception in the market that it simply does not work. Organizations relying on traditional data or network management solutions to manage their voice applications, rather than employing a tool specifically designed for that purpose, will be less than satisfied with the performance of their VoIP deployment. This problem creates a lose/lose situation for both vendors and enterprise IT departments, in which the technology does not deliver the anticipated results and IT decision-makers lose credibility within their organizations.

Businesses need to think out of the box when it comes to managing VoIP on their network. The reality is that old solutions can’t solve new problems because the old set of best practices is no match for the new challenges associated with VoIP. To properly manage VoIP and the new challenges presented, organizations need new processes and the development of new skills.

Going Beyond Fault Tolerance
Most IT departments manage their network reactively based on outages or when its fault management platform discovers poorly performing equipment in the network. This black-and-white method of managing does not account for a data and voice convergence paradigm, with shared infrastructure supporting multiple types of traffic. Monitoring connectivity between two end points is not enough to qualify the quality needed to successfully support VoIP. In other words, IP is about shades of gray, and you need to have management tools that will poll the network infrastructure in an ongoing manner. Tools that don’t deal with shades of gray are too reactive and only focus on the performance levels of the network infrastructure, not proactively foreseeing potential issues.