When the IT director at CI Travel put in VoIP to cut telecom costs, he soon realized he'd also need to find a new way to manage the VoIP traffic.

Paul Ingram, IT director at CI Travel, says he wanted CI to "completely break free of its dependence on the traditional phone system." CI Travel is a $150 million company with 300 employees at 49 locations across the globe. The core of their network is a high-capacity gigabit copper backbone located at corporate headquarters in Norfolk, Va. From there, a MPLS WAN connects the sites together. Each LAN is a switched gigabit copper network. The entire infrastructure is based on Cisco equipment.

He purchased VoIP phones from Cisco, which ultimately lowered the phone bill, but there were new problems that came up and he needed a way to manage them. He has about 200 VoIP phones at six sites, but performance was lacking. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2003/0915mgmt.html?rl

"Bad voice quality makes people turn to the standard phone system, which could quickly eliminate any savings we were intending to realize with VoIP," Ingram said. "The company depends heavily on phone communication to service customers; calls are going to be made with the most reliable phone, no matter the cost."

He looked into products from Network General and Network Instruments, and based on price and form factor (he preferred software to an appliance), he started working with Network Instruments' Observer software. Observer runs on a desktop or laptop and uses data collected from distributed probes. http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/accel/2005/0718netop1.html?rl

"We needed a way to play back calls and wanted to see how packets were traveling on the network," he says.

The Observer software not only let him see the discrepancies between voice and data traffic, but also, Ingram is now able to spot spyware and adware creeping into his network. http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/accel/2004/0726netop1.html?rl

"We were mainly using it to see voice quality, and then I realized Observer helps me show higher level executives how all this junk was getting on our network and the hours it took to clean up machines," Ingram says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.