Brix can map into monitoring unified communications as an application today, but “it gets interesting” when it comes to working through the many variations of servicedelivery platforms and the IP PBXs involved. “Microsoft has to touch various PBXs, and each PBX has its own flavor of SIP, so where things get interesting is getting access to that SIP ladder,” says Burnham. “We’re working with some of the PBXs right now; that’s a customer driven function so we can get access to those SIP ladders and get that data for the quality of service.”

As businesses of all sizes look at their monitoring needs, managed services become an alternative to inhouse ownership of specialized applications and hardware. Empirix (www.empirix.com) offers Hammer On-Call and VoiceWatch services for the contact center space. Hammer On-Call is a load-testing service that can be used to establish a baseline of existing applications and infrastructure before upgrades are performed.

“For these pre-production types of tests, stressing the environment helps the customer understand where the bottlenecks are,” says Susan Anderson, Product Marketing Manager for Empirix. “Do they have database problem? A problem in the PBX? Do I have a problem with the way a gateway or other type of technology is set up? What happens when the customer decides to implement a speech application and they have an IP telephony application?”

Once applications are in production, VoiceWatch provides a live monitoring service that places calls into a contact center on a live basis every 15 minutes or so, allowing operations staff to be notified if there’s a delay in any step of the call through completion to an agent. A recently announced capability provides testing and monitoring of backup systems and the applications that run on them. “People sometimes forget about these backup systems,” says Anderson. “They may have their IP department insuring their boxes are up, but they’re not making sure their applications are up.”

Monitoring contact center applications is likely to be the predecessor to applications monitoring within the enterprise, as unified communications expands the concept of an “agent” to be any person within an organization, anywhere in the world. “As the concept of a contact center becomes more entrenched in an organization, the concept of testing and monitoring will have to expand with that,” says Anderson. “It’s no longer just people sitting in a room and an IVR and DTI box. If anyone can be an agent, you have to know what’s happening out there.”

UC Driving Monitoring
Communicado (www.communicado-inc. com) believes unified communications is going to drive applications monitoring within the enterprise. “If someone wants to solve UC management, they have to understand the quality of experience issues, have to understand the software problems, and have to correlate that to the infrastructure it runs on,” says Kerry Shih, Chief Strategist, Communicado. “Until all of that is brought into the workflow for UC specific application, it doesn’t get interesting.”

Shih points out few companies have mastered the “trifecta” of infrastructure monitoring, defining quality of service, and then measuring quality of experience. “With UC thrust upon them, at the end of the day you will have three different departments all looking at how they are going to operate it…. Triangulating all of that is a struggle,” he says. Testing infrastructure companies have challenges working up the ISO stack from the basic network layers into software while Communicado started monitoring at the top–the applications– and moved downward.

Further, companies aren’t willing to shell out much more money over and above what they are currently paying when it comes to basic network monitoring. “The premiums are good, but not two or three times what someone would budget to manage any one piece,” says Shih. “You’ve got server device engineers, layer 7 engineer guys, voice/video QOE guys. If you stack up their budgets together, [the money to monitor applications] is not double that. Instead of having these different solutions, it all needs to be tied together. The premium is being able to correlate across all of that.”

Communicado has found a warm reception for the software as a service (SaaS) model, letting channel partners install and monitor their solution at the enterprise. “Customers don’t care how it is monitored; they want those workflows there, and they expect them to work,” says Shih. “They may or may not want their IT department to do it.” Using the SaaS model allows companies to select a solution without have to pay for specialized tools to perform three different functions. V

Doug Mohney can be reached at dmohney@vonmag.com.