Hosted VoIP

As enterprise applications become network based and services are being accessed by thousands of users, network operations personnel are challenged to quickly identify network problems to maintain user productivity. Xangati’s (News - Alert) rapid problem identification technology enables IT organizations to be the first to respond to application and network performance problems and ensures high productivity across the enterprise.

 

David Messina is vice president of marketing at Xangati, and he will be speaking on a panel simply entitled “QoS” on January 23 at the Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO, which is taking place in Miami Beach. I asked Messina what trends he was seeing that were driving the IP communications market forward.

 

 

DM: Management solutions optimized for VoIP have evolved from being an after-thought to being a central initiative within the enterprise IT organization. The shift has been catalyzed by the increasing awareness that the quality of experience for VoIP users has not markedly improved over the past couple of years and that this issue is a major obstacle standing in the way of more comprehensive adoption of the technology. Therefore, solutions that are focused on identifying the root causes of VoIP problems are becoming increasingly sought after, especially if they can relate issues directly back to the end-users.

 

DM: Xangati finished 2007 with strong momentum — we significantly exceeded our fourth quarter revenue goal. Contributing to our growth were some recent product enhancements that increased the “out of box” value of our appliance in such a way that our evaluations are being driven to more rapidly to successful completion — in other words proving out a business case in a shorter period of time.

 

DM: 2008 is going to be an even better year for Xangati than 2007. As we expand our sales operations to meet demand, we will demonstrate accelerated revenue growth. The value of our Rapid Problem Identification solution rings true even in times of economic uncertainty — that is because the product directly contributes to removing business inefficiencies. Given that every enterprise loses 35 days a year in productivity per employee due to poor application performance and availability (source: Yankee Group (News - Alert)), a solution that immediately drives IT to the root cause of these issues is going to be a highly sought after one.

 

DM: Rapid Problem Identification (RPI) technology has begun to create a major shift in how enterprises and service providers evaluate system and network management products. The RPI model presents a silo-free approach to understanding all the key interactions that are occurring within the complex networked application ecosystem. In doing so, these solutions can drive immediate value to the customer on the first afternoon of deployment in direct contrast to the costly and time-consuming integration work that comes with hardware probe and software-agent based models.

 

DM: Albeit an incredibly interesting VoIP technology, Skype cannot take credit for having made significant changes in the telecom landscape. It remains nothing more than a nice to have service for consumers and is a long ways away from being a properly vetted and supported technology for the enterprise.

 

DM: The brightest spot we have is the high degree of value that we are able to show our customers as of the first day of product install. By giving customers new insights into the interactions that are occurring over their IT infrastructure we are providing them real-time information to take effective action on issues affecting application productivity. This time to value is very powerful for them, given that most of their existing management solutions had three to six month system integration projects before they were able to see any value — whereas in that timeline we have already shown an ROI.

 

DM: Xangati’s biggest challenge is simply one of market education. Once our value proposition hits the ears of customers, they are generally eager to evaluate the product. The large network management framework vendors tend to respond defensively Xangati-like innovation, where early and ongoing value can remind customers that there is too much “same old” technology in this sector. It is fair to say these companies are not always eager for new voices to be heard. Our counter approach is to provide integration to these types of products so companies can simply merge the old with the new.

 

DM: Xangati’s presentation focus is on how management solutions can be leveraged to deliver an enhanced quality of service for the application end-user — VoIP or otherwise. Traditional “QoS” efforts have been primarily focused on technologies tied to infrastructure and the prioritization of traffic. However in reality, as most IT folks in service providers and enterprises know complex interactions across the infrastructure can result in suboptimal application productivity regardless of what “QoS” schemes are in play. My session discusses new management solutions that help ensure the quality of experience down to the end-user level.

 

DM: Service providers, enterprises, system integrators and sales channels interested in making great strides to improve the day-to-day quality of service delivery of applications all the way down to the end-user level.

 

DM: The novel perspective in my presentation is that advances in infrastructure are generally not enough to ensure an expected quality of experience for an end-user. The challenge is that complex interactions between networks, endpoints and applications often result in less than optimal application productivity issues. The only way to remedy these issues is to leverage management solutions that understand these interactions holistically (in a silo-free fashion) and can help IT teams to pinpoint problem sources as quickly as possible.

 

DM: The system and network management sector will finally be talked about in terms of dynamic innovation. Technologies are in play right now that will not only facilitate innovation for start-ups like Xangati, but equally important is that service providers and enterprises alike are clamoring for tools that will make them more effective in bringing productivity back to their end-users. The move away from time-consuming and costly hardware probe and software agent-based models will be a major theme within these discussions.