I was recently asked by a colleague about the state of the VoIP management market. While a number of new companies have entered the space in the last few years, there seems to be a perception that enterprises aren't buying VoIP management tools.
So assuming this perception is correct, why wouldn't enterprises buy VoIP management platforms? A couple of potential reasons:
1. VoIP vendors have generally pushed the idea that if you've got a network capable of delivering QoS, then VoIP quality will be as good if not better than TDM. If they then tell their customers that they need to procure a sophisticated call quality management platform to deal with performance-related issues, it may cause enterprises to become more concerned about potential quality issues and thus delay purchasing decisions.
2. Enterprises have a general disdain for application management tools. In many enterprises that I've worked with, complex tools such as Tivoli, OpenView, Unicenter etc. are either under-utilized, or are "shelf-ware", bought, but never actually deployed. Instead, most of the ops folks rely on simpler tools such as MRTG, What's Up Gold, and even Ping/Traceroute for simple troubleshooting. Obviously these tools aren't sophisticated enough to troubleshoot complex voice problems..which leads me
to point #3.
3. Enterprises still aren't aware of the products that are available, or the need just isn't quite there yet. Enterprises are only just now moving into the large-scaledeployment phase of their VoIP roll-out plans, and as such up until now haven't needed to secure VoIP-specific management platforms, so they haven't investigated the market. As roll-outs increase, this will change.
Finally, enterprises predominantly rely on integrators, service providers, and vendors for VoIP support. I suspect the real market for enterprise VoIP management systems will be to the support organizations rather than to the enterprises themselves.
Thoughts?
