While the economy could be the cause behind many stalled IT projects, recent survey data shows that concern about network performance causes IT managers to postpone some application deployments. 

Network and application performance management vendor Apparent Networks surveyed some 1,500 of its customers to learn more about what challenges network managers most. The survey found that more than one-third of network managers polled have delayed application deployments because of network performance concerns. Another 34% cited bandwidth issues at a third-party ISP or application provider as presenting the most issues with next-generation applications, such as VoIP, video and unified communications.

“If you think about it, the unique requirement of voice and live video is not just bandwidth but also latency. With video, latency can be buffered, but with VoIP only so much latency can be tolerated,” says Jim Melvin, president and chief marketing officer at Apparent Networks. “VoIP is one of the larger IT budget drivers today, but we are seeing a lot of delayed deployments because of bandwidth and network performance issues.”

Nearly 61% said that they had delayed a VoIP implementation due to network performance concerns. Some 35% postponed a video rollout for the same reasons and 26% put a unified communications project on hold. The survey also showed that network managers can’t always validate their service-level agreements (SLA) with external service providers. More than one-quarter of respondents don’t have the capability to validate SLAs, according to the Apparent Networks survey, and only 42% said they regularly validate their SLAs.

“IT managers are telling us that they are more and more dependent on unmanaged networks and distributed networks through carriers and in general that is a fine working relationship, but when you get to some of these more critical features, the performance isn’t there,” Melvin says. “You can almost take network connectivity for granted, but you can’t take network performance for granted.”

To help customers better tackle network performance at a lower cost, Apparent Networks recently made available its PathView Engineer product that is priced at less than $3,000. PathView can be used to pre-asses network readiness for new application deployments such as VoIP, video and latency-sensitive applications. The software also can be used to troubleshoot pain points to determine the location and cause of performance issues, distributed WAN/MPLS problems and degradation of cloud-based services, Apparent Networks says.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.