Network General Survey Reveals Unified Communications Challenges

Business Wire, August 27, 2007

Solving Them is a Priority Given the Increase in Communications Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Network General Corporation[TM], the leading provider of IT Service Assurance solutions, today released survey findings showing that components of a unified communications infrastructure are contributing significantly to network traffic. The survey also revealed that the impact of communications applications on network traffic is poised to become even more pronounced.

The survey, which polled 576 Network General customers worldwide, found that 75 percent of companies estimate that a quarter of their network traffic over the last three months consisted of unified communications-related applications (VoIP, unified messaging, instant messaging, etc). Forty percent of the companies polled use integrated voice, video and web conferencing, and nearly 70 percent have deployed VoIP - although only 12 percent credit voice communication alone as responsible for additional network traffic.

However, nearly 80 percent of respondents expect the network traffic from all their communications applications to increase during the next 12 months.

With the increasing communications traffic, IT managers constantly will be confronted with the challenge of maintaining quality of service for all applications. The ramp-up in unified communications is already taking its toll: Nearly 40 percent of companies have suffered application performance problems due to the convergence of communications applications onto their IP network, and almost twenty percent weren't sure if their performance problems were related to the convergence of communications.

"With the growth of unified communications and additional new applications, IT departments are finding that their environments are becoming increasingly complex, as each new service often comes with unique management tools," said James Messer, Director of Technical Marketing at Network General.

Unified-View industry analyst, Art Rosenberg, confirmed the survey results as indicative of the viral aspects unified communication applications will have upon enterprise network resources. "As end users adopt the efficiencies of unified communications tools, business communication traffic will increase. This, in turn, will increase the need for network flexibility and capacity for enterprise traffic," he said.

"UC migration will present enterprise organizations with a 'chicken and egg' problem. Until enterprises can gain intelligence into their business operations, they really won't know what their new network requirements will be," Rosenberg said. "Pilot testing with different types of users and business applications will be required in order for UC to evolve."

Despite the complexities, there's no stopping the trend. Only nine percent of respondents don't yet use a unified communications-related application in their business.

Indeed, as more and more corporate employees require the ability to seamlessly communicate with colleagues and customers while on the road, the need to support a unified communications infrastructure is only going to become more important. "The increasing mobility of the workplace is driving unified communications to a new usage level," says James Messer. "Additionally, it is through implementing unified communications - and streamlining business processes to support those communications - that IT managers will be able to help their companies communicate more effectively."

To reap the full benefits of unified communications, companies must put in place the tools to comprehensively manage applications and ensure that quality of service is maintained. "Network General allows companies to view the entire unified communications environment as a single business service, ensuring that the performance and availability of these diverse technologies is easily managed from a single dashboard," says James Messer.

Network General helps organizations optimize unified communications by:

* Offering network tools and features to access, manage, and share network intelligence for real-time IT performance management.

* Isolating the relationship between VoIP impairments and performance of other applications at specific points-in-time, thereby assuring the ongoing performance and availability of all critical business applications.

* Rolling VoIP and unified communications management into one suite that includes detailed VoIP and unified communications performance information with dashboard-level IT service views.

* Detecting audio and video performance impairments due to network-related factors, such as jitter, loss and transmission delay variations.

About Network General Corporation

Network General[TM] is a leading provider of IT management solutions designed to integrate and simplify troubleshooting and management across IT domains, assuring the delivery of IT services. The Network General portfolio consists of innovative software solutions and intelligent appliances that proactively monitor and manage all elements of IT infrastructure performance including network devices, applications, and servers, while simultaneously delivering a correlated view of the health of the business service.