Ken's Reaction to ComputerWeekly story - IT directors still concerned about VoIP

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This story on ComputerWeekly.com caught my eye and I feel compelled to comment.

IT directors still concerned about VoIP

A survey of 300 large enterprises across Europe, published today, has found that 73% of IT directors are still worried about basic quality and reliability of Voice over IP (VoIP), despite a strong industry trend towards converging voice and data traffic onto a single data network.
The research, by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Compuware, found that half of the large companies surveyed currently have a class of service (CoS) enabled wide area network (Wan) - which includes MPLS, IP-VPN or meshed technology. The other half have a traditional (frame relay or leased line) Wan.

Forty seven percent of the companies with a traditional Wan plan to migrate to a CoS enabled Wan over the next two years.

The research found that approximately a third (39%) of companies do not fully prepare for the impact on the network of introducing new applications such as VoIP.
In addition, 72% of the IT directors surveyed use basic measures such as monitoring overall network utilisation to check that applications are working, rather than examining the individual performance of each application.

First, if 72% of the respondents are simply performing ineffective broad network monitoring, it's no wonder they're concerned about VoIP performance. They already don't know what the heck their network utilization is. I wrote about the need to understand the network performance envelope in IP Telephony Demystified way back in 2002, a lifetime ago in network time. See Chapter 6 for excruciating details. I blogged about the basics two years ago on my personal blog. And I've written about this numerous times.

If 73% of IT managers surveyed are that far behind the times...well, it doesn't bode well for unified communications technologies.

47% still waiting to implement CoS on their networks. 39% fail to peform comprehensive readiness assessments prior to implementation, a recipe for failure. Of note in the article - Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan is one of many predicting that VoIP will account for around three-quarters of the world’s voice traffic by next year.

If this migration from TDM voice to VoIP is to succeed and to really push the momentum of migration to fully unified communications, equipment vendors and manufacturers had best finally get off their laurels and collaborate in educating the IT managers in business about the realities of networking in today's technologies. They've overhyped the "jsut add bandwidth" mantra too long and failure to educate now will doom them to disastrous failed implementations in that rush of voice traffic migration Frost & Sullivan predict. And I agree with Frost & Sullivan's expectations.

Need help? For starters, check the digital library here for my paper:
Needs Assessment and Network Readiness
From: The VoIP Essentials Series