Enterprise VoIP: A Risky Business Without the Right Tools

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1 Enterprise VoIP: A Risky Business Without the Right Tools OVERVIEW VoIP deployment isn t without its risks. Investment in IP telephony is the same as any investment the greater the potential return, the greater the actual risk. And, as with other investments, risk minimization and possible elimination can be achieved without reducing the potential return. This paper explains how. Produced Exclusively for Integrated Research by

2 Enterprise VoIP: A Risky Business Without the Right Tools... i Enterprise VoIP: The Paradigm Shift...1 Common Pitfalls and Their Impact on the Business...2 How to Eliminate These Risks and Save Your Reputation...4 Compelling Conclusions...5 Where to Now?...6 About the Author Steven Taylor, consultant and broadband packet evangelist, is President of Distributed Networking Associates and Publisher of Webtorials.com. An independent consultant, planner, author, and teacher since 1984, Mr. Taylor is frequently quoted in the trade press and is one of the industry s most published authors and lecturers on high-bandwidth networking techniques. He has served as Contributing Editor for Data Communications magazine, publishes articles in both Business Communications Review and Network World, and co-authors two newsletters Convergence and Wide Area Networking distributed by Network World Fusion. Augmenting his skill as a teacher and consultant, Mr. Taylor s background in actually planning, implementing, and running an extensive network for the University of North Carolina brings a unique, real-world perspective to his work. i

3 Enterprise VoIP: The Paradigm Shift Most companies have, at a minimum, begun investing in their implementation of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). However, as with any investment, VoIP is not without risks, and call quality and reliability are not a guaranteed outcome. Deploying a potentially unreliable phone system would pose substantial risks to any organization s reputation, revenue, and retention of customers not to mention the negative return on investment (ROI). In general, VoIP voice quality is good so long as the network infrastructure is properly designed and implemented. However, without testing the network s capability specific to the increased workload VoIP will introduce, it is not a safe assumption to make that, because the network is running far from capacity now, this will continue to be the case post-implementation. A continual cycle of analyzing the network, assessing network performance, and making adjustments is mandatory. Also, as you move from basic telephony to more complex converged integration, the need to monitor infrastructure performance and the impact that various applications can have on call quality becomes equally essential. For the voice group within many IT departments, deployment of VoIP represents a paradigm shift taking over the responsibility for buying, building, and maintaining communications infrastructure that was previously provided by others. As a result, many organizations are wisely up skilling their personnel in the new technology to further their control over what was previously provided by a utility or other third party. Whether the goal of your implementation is as tactical as cost savings and improving efficiency or as strategic as redefining your business processes, your support staff must be appropriately equipped to deal with maintaining excellent voice quality in a highly reliable telephony environment. It is no longer a matter of gaining control over your telephony it is about taking total control over a major aspect of your business-critical operations. 1

4 Common Pitfalls and Their Impact on the Business In a controlled test environment, VoIP almost always works well. But what happens when the next phase of implementation begins and everyone in the company from the CEO to the sales force to the branch offices are added to the network? How can you ensure that call quality is at least as good as, if not better than, the traditional network? And what is the potential impact to the business if things go wrong? The potential losses through multiple leaks can be intimidating. Lost customers, lost reputation, lost productivity, lost ROI a failed or unreliable VoIP deployment could cost you a fortune! Common VoIP deployment pitfalls and their impacts include: Poor planning resulting in additional cost to troubleshoot and rectify and threatening the success and timeliness of your project. Failure to successfully plan the budget, time, and the deployment and maintenance of these systems may seriously erode your ROI. Failing to assess your network s readiness resulting in poor call quality and lost income, reputation, and customers. As a real-life example reported and documented by Integrated Research, a large United States retail chain went straight to pilot without completing a network assessment. The company s call quality was terrible, the call setup delays were more than 5 seconds, and downtime was frequent and protracted. The pilot was deemed a failure and the roadmap to IP telephony was discarded. A substantial amount of money and resources was wasted, and the company reverted to its old TDM system. Failing to conduct careful lab tests and run assurance testing before going live resulting in project delays or even failure. Without simulating actual call activity during all times of the day, it is impossible to determine whether call quality can be maintained. Other than a full-scale deployment, only a VoIP network assessment tool can simulate the traffic and gauge the results with any clarity. Failing to simulate and test for worst-case rather than best-case resulting in unreliable service, extreme user dissatisfaction, and low productivity. In another example from Integrated Research: A midsized enterprise set up its automated assessment tools to run overnight so that telephony traffic wouldn t degrade the network service during the day. The results of the assessment showed acceptable voice quality for all calls. An initial implementation was then rolled out and very low voice quality was experienced because voice traffic was now competing with other IP applications for bandwidth. The company missed the point entirely if network service is open to potential degradation, that is exactly the time and place to test your capabilities. 2

5 Relying on existing data-centric tools resulting in time delays and excessive resources to resolve configuration and technical issues. Your car s odometer measures cumulative distance traveled and the speedometer measures your current speed. Can you measure current speed using only your odometer? Maybe with a stopwatch you could, but that means taking your eyes off the road. Using your existing data management tools to determine how your IP telephony is performing is like taking your eyes off the road be prepared to crash! Your IT department must have insight into the true cause of performance and Quality of Service (QoS) issues. Regardless of how well you ve built your network, bandwidth bandits such as Video over IP and Call Center applications can suddenly create unexpected scenarios that impact voice quality. In another example from Integrated Research, in an effort to understand its VoIP solution, operations staff of a small enterprise turned logging/tracing up to the maximum for the duration of its lab test. Test results showed a large percentage of call attempts in the lab test were failing. The staff was not impressed with the IP telephony product they had purchased. After installing a telephony-specific management tool to investigate further, they discovered the high logging/tracing levels were causing the processors to max out, the hard disks to fill, and the softswitch to fail. They then reduced the unrealistic logging/tracing levels and the solution worked perfectly. Failing to set realistic budgets for testing and management tools in the initial ROI assessment. No budget means no tools, and no tools means certain failure. So why do so many companies budget vast sums for a VoIP deployment destined for almost certain failure, while at the same time believing that testing and management tools are not worth the cost? Many, who have had deployments fail, consider employing management tools equal to throwing good money after bad and end up reverting to their old telephony system (as in the previous real-life case). Robin Gareiss, executive vice president of Nemertes Research stated The overall testing budget should run between 2 and 5 percent of the overall project budget, including capital expenditures (depreciated over the life of the project), software licenses, infrastructure costs, and operational costs. Of course, companies can reuse some of the software, hardware, and infrastructure, and indeed, many IT managers intentionally select testing products that dual as ongoing management products. Over and under provisioning, which wastes revenue and puts reliability at risk. One of the advantages of using telephony-centric tools is that you can measure capacity and optimize for typical or high-traffic scenarios. Trunk capacity can be very costly. Over provisioning costs you unnecessarily, while under provisioning may result in downtime or poor call quality in peak times. For example, a large distributed IT enterprise completed its network upgrade based on the information gathered during its network assessment. However, when the implementation was completed, the company discovered that a large percentage of its off-net call attempts were suffering from very low voice quality. After acquiring a management tool, the company identified there was insufficient bandwidth available to its primary PSTN gateway during peak hours of the week. It was then determined that the company had forgotten to simulate off-net traffic in the assessment. Present and future requirements can so easily be tested and managed for for much less than the cost of over provisioning. 3

6 How to Eliminate These Risks and Save Your Reputation Although these pitfalls can and do impact many organizations, highly reliable VoIP deployment is easily achievable. It all comes down to proper planning, sufficient resourcing, and having the right tools for the job. Management tools are an essential requirement for balancing quality and efficiency through every stage of your IP telephony life cycle (see Figure 1) from planning and design to installation and configuration through ongoing maintenance. The vendor s IP PBX systems will come with a degree of inherent management capabilities. However, the scope of these capabilities varies widely from supplier to supplier. The common preference is for third-party monitoring and management tools. The reason for this preference lies in the fact that third-party tools are singularly focused on the one goal to provide an accurate and unbiased view into the operation of the solution something that the IP PBX vendor can t be guaranteed to do The implementer may not realize that a more comprehensive tool set than that provided by the hardware vendor is needed until the installation is under way. At this point, it may be too late to add third-party monitoring systems into the budget. Figure 1: The IP telephony management life cycle. 4

7 An effective management and monitoring tool set for addressing the IP telephony life cycle should include solutions for Pre-deployment traffic simulation and network assessment Assurance testing prior to and during rollout Post-deployment fault and performance monitoring Call quality measurement Configuration management Call accounting Security management Fortunately, these tools are readily available from several established vendors. To quote Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research Budget for appropriate pre-deployment network assessment and ongoing monitoring tools. And when you ve budgeted for them use them! It is the only way to eliminate risk and save your reputation. Do not assume you are saving money by not implementing assessment or monitoring tools it is a false economy you will eventually need to assess your network and install a monitoring solution. Don t delay the inevitable for the sake of a few dollars saved now they will be spent tenfold repairing the damage. Lost revenue and reputation is harder to calculate and replace. Compelling Conclusions On a business and technical level, the benefits of deploying VoIP are compelling: cost savings, increased productivity and efficiency, and reduced resource needs to name just a few. However, deployment isn t without its risks. Your investment in VoIP is the same as any investment. And, as with other investments, risk minimization and possible elimination can be achieved without reducing the potential return all it takes is insurance and the preparedness to budget for the premium. Insurance for VoIP deployment takes the form of pre-deployment assessment, testing and ongoing real-time monitoring, and a formal approach to managing your IP telephony life cycle. These management tools exist the question now is Have you allocated a budget for them? 5

8 Where to Now? The selection of a third-party management solution will not be a simple task. The size of your deployment, future needs (whether they are known or unknown), and the geographic distribution of your organization are just some of the factors that will be used to determine a short list of appropriate solutions. To help steer you in the right direction and save you valuable time, independent analysts The Yankee Group has produced a VoIP Management Solutions Guide, which lists the available third-party solutions and provides a side-by-side comparison of the solutions appropriateness for different deployments. For your free download, go to 6