The Issue:

When it comes to VOIP security, most IT leaders have worried more about threats to the underlying data network than about potential attacks against VOIP systems themselves. Many IT managers see their VOIP networks as closed systems, protected from the outside world by the PSTN (public switched telephone network). So long as there was no way to reach their IP-PBXs via the public Internet or other outside networks, there is little threat of attack or compromise that could lead to data loss or service disruption. And by and large their views have been reinforced by the lack of attacks against VOIP servers,phones, gateways, and management systems. Less than 2% of enterprises had experienced a security incident directly involving their VOIP systems, while 96%had no known attacks.

Read this Issue Paper:

The Issue:

Unlike its TDM predecessor, IP telephony is not a closed-network, single-application environment using its own network resources. Rather, IP telephony is part of an overall unified-communications infrastructure, where multiple applications compete for finite network resources. As a result, IP telephony implementations require new monitoring and management tools and skills. But is the cost of these IP telephony management tools worth the benefit?

Nemertes Research has conducted an analysis evaluating the operational and capital costs of IP telephony, and has concluded that companies using IP telephony management tools demonstrate a compelling return on investment.

The Issue:

Headquarters and data centers have received ample attention in the past
five years from the IT and networking staffs. With data-center consolidation
projects in place at most organizations, an entire reassessment of the core
infrastructure has taken place. (Please see Nemertes’ Next-Generation Data
Centers benchmark series for more information). As data-center consolidation
projects wind down, IT focus is shifting to branch offices. In many cases, voice
and data applications and even security functions are in data centers.

Now, IT needs to deliver these centralized services to a steadily increasing
number of branches so employees can access applications and data securely and
consistently. This growing virtual workplace puts ever greater demands on the
network and IT infrastructure to support collaborative applications in a
consistent, predictable, and reliable manner. IT staffs must evaluate the needs of
each branch location and respond with a consistent set of products and services
enterprise-wide. They also must evaluate management options to find those that
most effectively prevent problems from emerging and quickly resolve the
problems that do.

Microsoft has officially launched Office Communications Server 2007, supporting integrated voice, video, instant messaging/presence, and telephony features through a software-based platform. Though it's behind most of the IP telephony vendors in offering such unified communications capabilities, many IT decision-makers are closely watching Microsoft's entry into this space as they develop their own unified communications plans.

The Issue:

The Issue:

The Issue

Nearly every company or organization is doing something with voice over IP today, ranging from evaluations to full adoptions. A continued area of interest among IT executives is total cost of ownership. Until 2005, organizations that implemented VOIP did so because of a real or perceived cost savings over traditional telephony. In many cases, they found substantial savings by eliminating costly third-party contracts for Moves, Adds and Changes (MACs), reducing the amount of cabling required in new buildings, or leveraging idle capacity in their data networks.

But for the past two years, cost has been a secondary driver to “futureproofing” the network. Rarely do we find IT executives who can justify investing in TDM technology when their PBXs must be replaced. They see IP as the platform for the future, and they want to be prepared for new applications— starting with voice—with a converged infrastructure.

The focus on cost has shifted from proving VOIP’s numbers vs. TDM’s numbers to comparisons between vendors. It’s no longer a matter of “if” a company goes to VOIP, it’s when. And when that time comes, they want to understand the different cost components of VOIP—and how key vendors compare with one another.

Nemertes has been tracking VOIP costs for four years and interviewed nearly 400 organizations of all sizes during that time. We will review 2007 trends in VOIP adoption and architecture and associated costs based on this extensive research. For actual costs, we will focus specifically on organizations with more than 1,000 end units on their VOIP systems.

Read This Issue Paper

Clients: Nemertes Issue Paper: VOIP Business Case

More than 75% of organizations are using, planning to use, or evaluating unified-communications products, according to Nemertes' “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace” benchmark.

So it's no wonder Microsoft's beta release of Office Communications Server 2007 has so many IT decision-makers looking into their crystal balls to figure out how the world's largest software vendor might play into their telephony strategies.

OCS is Microsoft's latest unified-communications offering, which integrates IP voice with Office and other applications. Microsoft wants companies to use Office as the front-end to their telephony and rely upon OCS for the back-end, directly positioning themselves against traditional IP-PBX vendors.

By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence, March 9, 2007

This week at VoiceCon IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) announced plans to integrate their unified communications client development, and make their source code freely available. This announcement builds on IBM’s previous release of Sametime 7.5 in September of 2006, which is based on the open-source Eclipse framework. IBM is also offering certification of products developed on its platform, thus providing a guarantee that apps will interoperate. (Third parties who develop products using the Cisco-IBM code must pay licensing fees to bring those products to market). .

Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, 2/5/07

Last week Skype introduced new features for its “Skype for Business” offering designed to make Skype manageable in a business environment. Do these tools finally give the green light for widespread enterprise deployment? Well….the answer is a decidedly “maybe”.

Skype initially announced its business offering last year, which was designed to let small groups centralize billing for Skype-to-PSTN connectivity services (SkypeIn/SkypeOut). With last week’s announcement Skype adds management and configuration tools, enabling Windows network administrators to use the Windows Installer to centrally deploy Skype and disable unwanted features such as file transfer capabilities (no such capabilities yet exist for centralized control of Mac or Linux clients). In addition, Skype announced enhancements to its business control panel, further improving centralized account administration capabilities.

The Issue:

Unified communications offers tremendous opportunities for enterprises of all sizes to improve organizational efficiency and enhance collaboration. By integrating voice with related real-time communications applications including instant messaging, presence, and voice/video/Web conferencing, an organization can make it easier for individuals to access the information they need in a timely and efficient manner, enabling faster and more efficient response to customer and sales inquiries.

A key opportunity for unified communications resides in the contact center. Unified-communications technologies can be a bridge to enable contact-center agents to shorten problem-resolution cycles, quickly answer customer inquiries, or more effectively up-sell services and/or products to prospective customers.

Taking Your Converged Infrastructure to the Next Level

Join Robin Gareiss, executive vice president & senior founding partner of Nemertes Research, for an informative Webcast addressing the following questions:

*Why are your VOIP plans significant to your video strategy?
*When and why do organizations consider IP videoconferencing?
*What, specifically, drives IT & business leaders to use videoconferencing?
*What is the payback on IP videoconferencing?
*Why does videoconferencing quality matter?
*What are the common pitfalls organizations face in their video

Replay this webcast.

By Irwin Lazar, Principal Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration & Convergence, Nemertes Research Inc.

Aug. 11, 2006

At last week's BlackHat conference in Las Vegas, Mark Collier, CTO of SecureLogix (http://www.securelogix.com); and Dave Endler, Director of Security Research for Tipping Point, a subsidiary of 3Com (NASDAQ:COMS, http://www.3com.com) released a set of VoIP hacking tools in support of their forthcoming book, "Hacking Exposed VoIP" (ISBN: 0072263644). The release of these tools, coming just weeks after police in Miami broke up a ring defrauding VoIP service providers, serves to demonstrate a powerful message; that attacks against VoIP systems and services are not only possible, but can be expected to increase.

Collier and Endler's tools were notable in that their approaches relied as much on social engineering as the use of coded hacking tools. Their presentation also detailed numerous vulnerabilities in SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol) that could easily be exploited, and demonstrated how the increasingly popular Asterisk open source VOIP server could be used to launch numerous attacks. Collier and Endler released their tools to warn VOIP users against security complacency and raise awareness of VOIP vulnerabilities.

If you would like to receive our full Impact Analysis, sign up for our weekly newsletters.

By Christopher J. Kardish, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research Inc.
July 13, 2006

New phones seem to come out every day, but this week, D-Link (TAI: 2332, www.dlink.com) delivered a WiFi phone that speaks worlds about the convergence of wireless, VOIP and cell-phone form factors, a trend Nemertes Research has identified in numerous reports.

The phone features a familiar, lightweight, flip-phone design with a 100-number memory, caller id with name, call waiting, call forwarding, and a text-messaging system. A three-hour talk time/70-hour stand-by time shows the progress made in managing power consumption – a problem with portable WiFi devices.

If you would like to receive our full Impact Analysis, sign up for our weekly newsletters.

By Robin Gareiss, EVP & senior founding partner, Nemertes Research Inc.
June 8, 2006

Taking a cue from the cellular industry, Global Crossing (NASDAQ: GLBC) announced a pricing plan that provides free calls between any voice-over-IP calls on its network. The service, VOIP Community Peering, responds to the growing demand for more compelling returns-on-investment for VOIP and also underscores the demand for more innovative VOIP services from the carriers.

The offering essentially lets organizations create VOIP extranets, allowing business partners or divisions of large enterprises to leverage the benefits of on-net VOIP without creating a private-number dialing plan.

If you would like to receive our full Impact Analysis, sign up for our weekly newsletters.

Final in the series of how organizations extend VoIP to the branch

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 06/06/06

This weeks’ column concludes our three-week analysis of how organizations extend VoIP to their branch offices.

Most commonly, they install IP PBXs at every location; 40% have adopted a distributed architecture. Another 35% deploy their PBXs regionally, and link each branch to an number of regions (also known as a clustered approach).

The regional or "clustered" approach to branch office VoIP

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 05/30/06

So…IP telephony is installed and humming along at corporate headquarters. Now it’s time to extend the technology to the branch office.

If you haven’t already determined right architecture for branch extension, it’s vital to spend some time thinking about what makes the most sense for your situation.

May 17, 2006
Written by Melanie Turek

Nemertes’ research shows that close to 95% of organizations are deploying, or have plans to deploy, voice over IP (VoIP) in the next two years. Doing so will certainly help those organizations lower their voice costs overall, as well as take advantage of IP capabilities to add new applications—and treat voice itself as an application going forward. However, among those companies, only around 23% are in the midst of a full VoIP adoption; among the rest, close to 30% are in the middle of a growing rollout, around 20% report a limited deployment, and just over 6% are still in the pilot phase. Furthermore, just over 50% of companies are or plan to extend VoIP to telecommuters. That means that today, the vast majority of organizations aren’t yet realizing the cost and productivity benefits of VoIP across the enterprise, or their entire employee base.

As a result, many employees are using consumer-oriented peer-to-peer voice services, such as those offered by Skype and Vonage, on the job, usually in an effort to save their employers a few bucks on interstate and international calls. But by their very design, these services pose significant security threats to any business IT infrastructure. As a result, IT executives are faced with a problem: Allowing their end users to act on their desire to save the company money, while not opening up their entire business to hackers and malware.

Comparison by Nemertes rates Avaya, Nortel, ShoreTel.

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 05/15/06

In the Nemertes study, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and ShoreTel garnered enough statistical responses to be counted individually.

When we asked respondents how much time they spent on operational start-up, measured in minutes per user, Cisco came out on top at 250 minutes per user, followed by Nortel at 186 minutes, Avaya at 77 minutes and ShoreTel at 69 minutes.

Nemertes study shows that as companies broaden their VoIP rollouts, setup costs increase - but so do savings.

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 05/15/06

When IT executives make the strategic decision to implement VoIP and other converged applications, cost savings is one of the key drivers.

But is VoIP really a money saver? Based on a Nemertes Research survey of 90 IT executives, the answer is yes - over time. In other words, steep start-up costs will be offset in the long run by significant savings.

Published: 03/17/06

Simple capabilities are often what drives sophisticated organizations to commit to VoIP and larger convergence projects

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 01/24/06

For the past three years, I’ve conducted an extensive research benchmark assessing VoIP and convergence.

* Integrating management of data center facilities with information systems

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 11/15/05

Convergence has had a significant impact on enterprise networks and data centers, with voice and video and data frequently carried on the same IP network.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 10/24/05

Convergence changes things. Although combining voice and data across the same packet network wouldn't, in theory, imply dramatic changes in the organization and operations of an IT department, in practice companies that implement convergence find themselves revisiting almost every aspect of their operations.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 08/08/05

VoIP security is beginning to get a lot of attention. But is its visibility warranted? In June, Gartner called VoIP security concerns "over-hyped" and urged IT executives not to hold off on VoIP deployment because of such concerns.

A step-by-step guide to determining the true cost and benefits of VoIP.

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 07/11/05

When it comes to VoIP, most network managers are satisfied that the technology works.

* Empowering convergence using Power-over-Ethernet

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 06/28/05

As companies move forward with their VoIP rollouts (96% of 68 IT execs polled in a recent Nemertes benchmark say they've either deployed VoIP or plan to do so within the next 12 months), one issue they often neglect is ensuring appropriate power.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 06/13/05

If you're like a lot of network executives, you've begun to look seriously at deploying a converged infrastructure. And you're probably aware that successfully deploying convergence means more than rolling out an IP PBX. It requires rethinking not just the phone system but everything from service provider service-level agreements (SLA) to network operations - and even more importantly, assessing the ways that converged applications can help improve the business bottom line.

By Robin Gareiss, Nemertes Executive Vice President & Sr. Founding Partner
May 27, 2005

The recent announcement of the BCM 50 small-business IP PBX by Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT) highlights the growing momentum of VOIP in the small-business market. Nemertes expects the small-business market to become increasingly more competitive in the next 12 months, as an increasing number of vendors begin to target this space.