Verizon Business (NYSE:VZ) this week announced "Network Assessment with Voice," a service aimed at helping client and non-client enterprises understand their level of readiness for VOIP. Verizon's new service highlights enterprises' growing awareness of the importance of assessing the performance of enterprise applications directly at the desktop.

The new offering is built around privately held Centrisoft's Aware software. Aware sits inside Windows' network stack, monitoring traffic at the session layer. It provides performance data on network streams to and from the PC for all applications. (A separate product, Control, allows prioritization of the traffic).

This shift of performance assessment to the desktop is significant for two reasons. First, it meets an enterprise desire for real data about application performance from the user perspective. While nearly all participants in Nemertes' "Delivering the Enterprise: Service Delivery and Management" benchmark said they wished they had this kind of data, only 36% ever measured performance at the desktop directly, and only 20% did so regularly. Second, it anticipates the integration of voice applications into the desktop. Most VOIP deployments are still centered on actual VOIP phones, and providing real end-node performance data is important to qualifying a network for adding VOIP phones.

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