* VoIP and WAN redesign to impact WANs, survey respondents say
Last time, we discussed a survey that we recently conducted to identify the type of activities that will have the greatest impact on IT organizations over the next year. We mentioned that the top-two activities cited by the survey respondents were compliance and security. Today, we’ll look at the other two top activities that followed behind: VoIP and WAN redesign.
Given all the discussion of VoIP over the last several years, it would be reasonable to believe that the major VoIP deployments have been done and the ongoing impact of VoIP on IT budgets and infrastructure is minimal. However, roughly two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that VoIP deployment would have at least some impact on their IT budget and infrastructure over the next year.
As was the case with security and compliance, there is significant overlap in terms of VoIP deployment and WAN redesign. In particular, the vast majority of survey respondents who indicated that VoIP deployment would have at least some impact on their IT budget and infrastructure also indicated that their company was undergoing at least some WAN redesign.
That overlap is a result of IT organizations needing to redesign their WAN in order to support VoIP and other demanding applications. For example, one survey respondent stated that in order to support applications such as VoIP and IP video, his organization was “going through the painstaking activity of migrating to MPLS, including the use of Virtual Private LAN Services.”
We’ll revisit the topic of MPLS in future newsletters when we explore the MPLS services available from the major carriers. In the meantime, you can review our previous newsletters about MPLS in private networks: “Private MPLS nets give organizations more control over their WANs”; “Supporting VPNs within MPLS networks”; and “The benefits of traffic engineering MPLS networks “.
