The changing sound of UC in an Application-Era

Bill Ting

AS more and more organisations embrace unified communications—a real-time, latency- sensitive application—to increase collaboration across remote employees, customers and partners, issues like broken images and garbled audio can have a profound impact on the company’s bottom line. Optimizing and protecting UC traffic by compressing other applications to save bandwidth and reduce wide area network (WAN) congestion is the key to success for most of the solution providers.

Unified communication applications provide new ways to share information but maintaining a high degree of availability, and control over other applications contending on the network can lead to system downtime and higher operational costs. It should be ensured, UC applications achieve highly resilient, scalable and secure UC deployments by dynamically provisioning and scaling application delivery controller resources across multiple locations and servers. Meanwhile, robust quality-of-service (QoS) policies prioritize and protect UC traffic from other bandwidth-hungry applications and control inbound traffic to avoid congestion.

UC offers increased collaboration across employees, customers and partners but those benefits are outweighed if IT lacks the ability to monitor voice and video streams, or resists implementing changes for fear of breaking something. Providing packet based visibility and user experience metrics—noise, echo, delay and distortion—for optimal UC application performance should also be a focus. Meanwhile, troubleshooting and analytic tools along with performance dashboards track configuration changes, quickly isolate the root cause of call failures and monitor SIP trunk utilization.

Applications like conferencing, mobility, video, and collaboration have unforgiving performance levels and always-on availability requirements to meet the high expectations of users. Maintaining that rock-solid level of performance throughout the end-to-end life cycle requires the right set of tools.

Having clear visibility into the unified communication system behaviour at all times increases the confidence in the system and the ability to manage it, which shortens development and testing times. The root cause of problems can be quickly identified through configuration changes by keeping track in-depth of nearly all changes made to the VoIP environment, including updates to all configuration elements and their attributes. Implementation of Unified Communication, can “break-fix” trap and extract the most value from your unified communication investment. In multi-site environments, troubleshoot and diagnose problems can be a critical component to increased efficiency, speed and responsiveness of your voice IT team.

Repetitive problems can be eliminated or reduced by gaining insight into how small configuration changes can affect service quality. With a mission-critical application such as unified communication, it is imperative to test the functionality of the system after deployment, following upgrades, and during off-hours when problems may go undetected.

Automated proactive testing monitors service availability and replaces costly manual testing. Many believe that UC is in fact a collection of applications that are integrated together to help you drive your business processes. In the old days, IT was divided so that the phone people were in one silo and the data people were in another. Importantly, now that the tech infrastructure has converged, we should not make those arbitrary divisions anymore.

That’s why UC has become just another application. UC applications comprise software applications; a data-center or cloud running standard operating systems like Linux or Windows; a network using standard equipment; and compute-equipped devices such as desktop phones, smartphones, or computers. By any definition these are applications like any other and can therefore be managed by a standard application-performance management solution. UC is composed of applications but end-user expectations are different for UC applications, particularly in the realms of voice and video. That is, people view an always-available dial tone as their right. If you pick up the phone and there’s no dial tone you’ll be very put off —much worse than when your email acts a little slow.

The two major reasons why UC apps require special treatment with specialized management tools is because of its high end-user expectations and the real-time nature.

(The views have been authored by Bill Ting, Marketing Evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed Technology. Cybermedia does not necessarily subscribe to or endorse the opinions mentioned above.)