While we’ve focused lately on product rollouts and trade shows, Steve and the folks at Webtorials have been busy sharing some great material our readers may find useful including two vendor-sponsored papers we’ll highlight today and two Webtorials Analyst Division pieces we’ll review next time. Today, we’ll focus on some tips from Integrated Research on “Managing Multi-Vendor UC and Collaboration in a Virtual World” and from Verizon Business and Cisco on “SIP Trunking — Addressing the Hidden Costs of Telephony Networks.”
Cisco and Verizon Business have partnered on a white paper discussing SIP trunking, beginning with the premise that some of the hidden costs of traditional TDM (time division multiplexing) phone networks are becoming apparent because these traditional networks are location-oriented, need physical provisioning, maintenance, and management at the site of the voice access lines — thus making TDM systems inefficient and costly. A more efficient solution in the form of SIP trunking takes advantage of IP broadband connectivity, combining multiple voice circuits with data networks.
IN DEPTH: Conquering the complexities of the converged voice network
According to the paper, a recent study estimates companies that adopt SIP trunking can save 26% compared to what they now pay for TDM trunks. SIP trunks offer the advantage of deploying multiple phone lines as they are needed, allocating phone capacity across various locations. SIP trunking also provides a platform and protocol that can add a variety of business-enhancing applications and services to boost employee efficiency. SIP trunking has become increasingly important as a natural part of the evolution of VoIP networks. A free copy of the “SIP Trunking” paper is available here.
Integrated Research has provided some advice on how to manage unified communications and collaboration in a virtual world with their latest paper. They point out that “when hardware is virtualized, with multiple guests acting as individual servers it’s critical to know that it’s up to the job. When a guest running a continuity-critical application makes a request in real time it is without regard for other host activity. Hence both guests and hosts can come under performance pressure. With this type of environment problems can exist in any one of the layers.”
The company recommends that problem detection needs to be-layer, multi-vendor and multi-technology since performance issues can reside in the physical hardware, the virtual machines or the applications. The paper looks at how the host, guests and applications performance metrics. It concludes that “availability, performance and quality assurance are as much key performance indicators in the cloud as well as down on the ground … and as service level agreements for cloud computing are service rather than customer-based, cloud service providers need to manage the ability of their infrastructure to provide the service their customers are paying for.” A free copy of this resource is available here.
Our thanks to Cisco and Integrated Research for sponsoring these educational resources and to Webtorials for making them available.
