Enterprises with multi-vendor IP telephony need single-tool management

I've just finished reading a May, 2007 white paper entitled Multi-vendor IP telephony management: challenges and solutions.

From performance-management solutions provider Prognosis, the nine-page paper's conclusions are that in light of Nemertes Research findings attesting to the doubling (10& to 20%) of enterprises that have multi-vendor IP telephony environments, a number of challenges face these enterprises.

The white paper says these enterprises would do best in terms of managing IP with a single tool. But if they don't, they will find out that:

• Multiple IP telephony vendor tools cannot be unified into a single management display;
• Procuring and maintaining multiple IP telephony management tools is expensive;
• Training network operations staff is time-consuming and expensive;

The white paper then suggests that tools capable of managing multiple IP systems in an enterprise should have the following capabilities:

• Support for core issues across the management lifecycle;
• Support for the entire telephony ecosystem;
• Support for vendor specific metrics and application protocol interfaces;
• Scalability;
• Distributable architecture;
• Flexible SLAs;
• Customizable views;
• Interoperability with higher level management tools.

With such tools in place, benefits to the multiple IP systems enterprise include the ability to:

• Provide operations staff with a unified view across disparate IP telephony environments;
• Eliminate the need to procure and maintain multiple management tools;
• Reduce the time and expense involved in training staff to use different management solutions.