The Packet Scoop

Mid market companies, defined by PacketTrap as business with between 250 and 5,000 end points, are finally starting to adopt VoIP at a strong rate. This is both good news and bad news. First, traditionally PBX phone system support has not been part of the job description of the IT department. That is, PBX systems are many times supported by facilities or farmed out to the value added reseller.

Boy have things changed. VoIP means potentially intense traffic over your IP network. As a system admin or network engineer that means lots of meaty bandwidth issues. The good news is that VoIP phone systems are starting to get better (but that’s for another blog post), but the bad news is that the vendors of VoIP phones have done a very poor job of providing the IT networking tools required to manage the solution. Companies such as Avaya and others have done a wonderful job of bringing VoIP to the mid market, but they’ve done an outright lousy job of developing easy to use, yet robust and affordable networking tools the integrate into your network management software system. What does this mean?

First, not only do you, as a network admin, need to understand VoIP as it relates to your network, but you also need to understand what it means to maintain a VoIP network. The problem is that Avaya and other VoIP phone vendors spend their time on enterprise customers with large wallets who are ready to invest big dollars in a VoIP management system. Great. But what do the rest of us do?

A few third-party IT networking tools and IT discovery companies focused more on the mid enterprise and mid market have recently released VoIP network management solutions. Unfortunately, they’re very immature. NetQos recently released their $30k VoIP monitoring solution, which is a hit on the wallet for sure. SolarWinds released their VoIP monitoring solution several months ago. It’s a bit cheaper but it’s also very immature.

Our perspective is that VoIP is a rapidly expanding market and it makes sense to wait a bit longer before embracing the technology. Not only is the actual VoIP phone technology getting better by the month, but so are the third party IT networking tools to support it. If you’re in the market for a VoIP phone system wait another six to eight months. This will provide a bit more time for the technology to mature and, as important, it will allow for the third party VoIP networking tools to provide more robust and useful functionality.