Back in the "good old days" managing telephony as a part of the WAN was pretty simple. Traditional telephony used dedicated bandwidth, and the major task was to ensure that enough circuits were available to have minimal call blocking. Now, however, IP telephony (IPT) has become a major application on essentially every WAN and the effective management of IPT is a major component of overall WAN management. In a recent study titled "2008 IP Telephony Management State-of-the-Market Report Series" (available at Webtorials), 80% of respondents estimate that IPT would be their primary technology within a little over 2 years, and 50% reported that it would be primary in a little over one.

So now the focus has to move from simply implementing ITP to managing these systems in an on-going manner. One of the keys to effective management is, of course, having appropriate management tools. And while the deployment of third-party tools is lagging behind IPT deployment in general, the report also points out that “Organizations with more complete IPT deployments make greater use of third-party IPT management products, but all organizations plan to make increased use of them.” This is most understandable since many companies do not use these tools proactively, and, instead, they wait until problems crop up that require more extensive tools. There also exists a general lack of awareness of the availability of these tools.

Finally, a just-released module focuses on “Drivers for Third-Party IPT Management.” In this module, the need for these third-party tools is examined more extensively. Here, a major finding is that, “The biggest reasons that users purchase third-party IPT management tools are to monitor performance in real time and to obtain improved capabilities to measure service levels.” However, a major - and growing - need is to manage systems from multiple suppliers. This is a particularly salient point due to the continuing mergers of companies of all sizes, many of which already have a full, or at least partial, IPT deployment.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.