Study: unified enterprise communications apps leading to "performance issues"

Citing a study of nearly 600 IT professionals by network management vendor Network General, SearchVoIP.com news editor Andrew Hickey notes  that as companies converge communications apps onto their IP networks, VoIP and unified communications applications are causing performance issues.

The study found that nearly 40% of responding companies have suffered what Andrew terms "application performance problems" because of all the new capabilities being added to the networks.

"The overall result here is, 'Yes, we're having performance problems,' " Andrew quotes Network General director of technical marketing James Messer as saying.  "And if you don't have a way to solve those issues, you're perhaps setting yourself up for bigger problems down the line."

The goal of the study, Messer told Andrew, was to show that companies of all sizes are adding communications to their networks, and that is resulting in a massive increase of network traffic. That increase could have a huge impact on existing traffic.

The impact appears to be quanfifiable. Some 75% of responding companies estimated that 25% or so of their network traffic over the last three months was unified communications-related. That includes unified messaging, instant messaging, and VoIP.

Not only that, but nearly 80% of respondents said they expect the network traffic from all of their communications applications to increase over the next year.

"The old way of looking at and understanding applications isn't working," Messer said. "There's got to be a more logical way, a more comprehensive way. Look at all of these applications as a single IT service and come out of the silos."