Each year for most of the last decade we have heard that this is the year of VoIP. The reality is that in our industry, something as broad-based and complex as the adoption of VoIP does not happen in a year. That being said, it can take a big step forward in a year. With that definition in mind, we think that this is the year of network and application optimization – the year that it takes a big step forward.
Steganography meets VoIP in the hacker world
We recently gave a survey, one of the goals of which was to identify the importance and difficulty of 16 network and optimization tasks. We want to thank those readers who took the time to fill out the survey – your input was truly valuable.
When we looked at the survey results, perhaps the biggest surprise was the large number of optimization tasks that IT organizations said are very important for them to get better at over the next year. Also, while we were not surprised that “Relating the performance of applications to the impact on the business” was the most important task, we were somewhat surprised that “Ensuring acceptable performance for VoIP traffic” was the second most important topic. Perhaps 2010 is indeed the year of VoIP?!
One of the reasons why we were surprised that so many IT organizations hoped to get better at ensuring acceptable performance for VoIP traffic this year is that we thought that most IT organizations were already good at this. Another such task is “Optimizing the performance of TCP”. The majority of survey respondents indicated a strong interest in getting better at that task this year.
In addition to getting better at some of the traditional optimization challenges, there were a number of tasks that the survey respondents indicated were important to get better at that belong to a second generation of application delivery challenges. This includes improving the performance of applications used by mobile workers and ensuring acceptable performance for telepresence traffic.
Now that we have a handle on what network and application optimization tasks are important to IT organizations in 2010, we have just kicked off a new survey. The goal of this survey is to identify what steps IT organizations intend to take in 2010 to get better at optimizing and managing application delivery. We would appreciate it if you could fill out the survey. You can access it here.
