With Voice over IP (VoIP), for example, many factors influence the quality of a call. Finding the culprit can be a daunting task. Today, there are many tools, both free and costly, that help network engineers and managers find out what’s going on with the network: Quality of Service (QoS) tools, packet sniffers, network analyzers — the list is vast.

Visualization of VoIP call quality and configuration using TruView

Fluke Networks Visual — the performance management brand of Fluke Networks — added to this list with it’s TruView announcement this week. Unlike other network monitoring solutions, the product enables network engineers to troubleshoot an application performance issue within three or four clicks of a mouse. TruView shows both packet and flow-based views of network and application performance. The depth and breadth of application performance monitoring (APM) coupled with the ability to troubleshoot network problems not only consolidates tools, but helps IT solve service quality issues more quickly.  

The TruView tool can monitor all network traffic except for video (which is in the works), but Fluke Networks Visual Vice President Daryle DeBalski calls out VoIP monitoring specifically “because it’s so important in today’s business world…. Almost all of our customers use [VoIP].”

DeBalski said in a phone call that TruView can analyze VoIP traffic in realtime because its appliance stores all the packets and calls: “We can re-construct an audio call so [network enginners] can hear what the user heard.”

While other vendors store these packets, Debalski says the TruView appliance “does it in one place unlike anybody else.” It works with 1 and 10 gigs of data streams and generally saves two weeks of packet calls and application traffic unless their customer has specialized needs.

Rather than having to measure network traffic from weeks ago, the appliance is also smart enough to calculate baselines to let IT know what’s considered “good” performance on a typical Monday morning.

Ultimately, fixing “the network is slow” problems is what TruView is designed to do. While other tools may give you a bell or alarm to let you know something is wrong, a “true view” of network traffic can make that user experience all the happier.

While it may not be the most important feature vendors focus on when creating or upgrading a unified communications platform or application, “user experience” is growing in vendor mindshare. Users are making it clear that they have devices (smartphones and tablets, namely) that they love and would like to leverage to get their work done, not just to play Angry Birds.

Along with BYOD, users are asking for ease-of-use when it comes to UC offerings. A.T. Kearney’s Kevin Rice mentioned that his own enterprise uses an internal UC platform with an interface that “looks like Facebook,” so it is easier and more familiar to users. It results in employees actually using the UC platform — which is the major critical success factor for UC.

Users are also asking for communication and collaboration capabilities to be better integrated into their workflows. Most employees already use email, instant messaging and intranet platforms every day, and that’s not even counting other social media tools like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. Who really wants to have to remember another password and sign into another application at work?

Analysts are stressing this “no more passwords” requirement from users, and vendors have listened, as well. But challenges lay ahead. UC is already a mixed vendor environment, and most companies have different vendors for voice, video and collaboration. Everybody admits that integration is a major unsolved issue.

An interoperable inter-vendor federation for UC is a realistic goal that a panel of speakers from Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, and Nextplane — led by Russell Bennett, principal analyst of UC insights — believe in.

While UC federation sounds like a great idea for enterprises, establishing trust between UC platforms is not something that is going to happen overnight, according to Albert Kooiman, senior product manager for Microsoft.

But Kooiman predicts that in the future, the idea of UC federation will be a thing of the past, as different companies will have the ability to work together seamlessly without dissimilar UC vendors standing in their way.

After all, isn’t it called unified communications for a reason?