At VoiceCon last week, there was much hoopla around IP telephony management, led by EMC’s announcement to play in the space following a partnership deal inked with Integrated Research. Finally…IT decision-makers are paying at least some attention to how they will manage their voice (and ultimately unified) communication infrastructure.

This has been a topic near-and-dear to me for at least the past four years - mainly because I’ve seen firsthand how negatively it affects organizations and their branch-office workers when they don’t have adequate IP telephony management tools or services in place.

Nemertes also has documented that per-person operational costs drop significantly when companies deploy IP telephony management tools from vendors that specialize in them: Those using no tools spend $1,262 per person per year, vs. $113 when they use IP telephony specialty tools.

Why is the news about EMC entering IP telephony so important? Because by combining EMC’s Smarts tool with Prognosis—and providing links between the information - IT managers can more quickly evaluate IP telephony performance, find weak points, and isolate/resolve problems. The new products will manage Avaya and Cisco gear, and as Integrated Research adds additional IP telephony vendors, they’ll be supported, as well.

EMC’s Smarts VoIP products (which range from $25 to $35 per phone) focus on network availability, while Integrated Research’s Prognosis drills into the IP telephony application - measuring criteria such as packet loss, jitter, or latency. It becomes much easier for remote IT managers to determine not only when problems are occurring (or may occur based on network conditions), they can analyze the root cause based on data from two perspectives.

Companies managing VoIP with remote workers must evaluate IP telephony management products—and I expect more vendors to facilitate similar partnerships.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.