Psytechnics: a network performance perspective on unified communications

Core UC belief: Network performance must be considered in unified communications deployments or the investment will be wasted.

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Psytechnics, an IP voice performance management firm, builds a set of algorithmic products that are used by service providers to proactively monitor voice and video conferencing streams. The company was spun out of BT Labs as an independent entity nine years ago, and it uses technology about how people process audio and visual signals to give a close approximation of how they would interact with video and voice communications.

Joe Frost, vice president of marketing, said  enterprises are looking at UC and asking "what difference is it going to make, hype aside."  They want to know how they can use unified communications technology to remove desktop connection, reduce cost, and increase collaboration. But Frost said they should be worried about getting the basics right first.

"You have to get VoIP right first, then you can overlay the other features on top, like presence, IM, video conferencing and telepresence," Frost said. "We talk about them like they're automatic, but a multi-vendor environment integrating desktop applications with someone else's voice switching infrastructure requires substantial integration and testing. We've done the integration publicly, because the real world is multi-vendor."

Frost said Psytechnics gives more than just a summary or network report, as other performance monitoring solutions do, but instead, the company's products monitor the listening quality and conversational quality in real-time. When a problem on either end of the call occurs, a support desk can pinpoint the problem quickly.

"We monitor IP calls in real time and produce a set of statistics in real-time, detect jitter, echo, etc. and an alarm comes up on system when call quality degrades," Frost said. "The IT professional can see how all calls are behaving across the network, where as other solutions only use estimates to determine performance."

Frost said this system allows service providers to provide Service Level Agreements that better reflect end user experience.

He also mentioned a scenario where a unified communications deployment was rolled out sans proper testing by a large dispersed corporation with dozens of regional offices. Call quality issues were rampant, causing many users to abandon the expensive unified communication system and leading the company to scrap its significant investment in a VoIP transition altogether.

Frost said the situation could have been avoided by proactive testing, saving the enterprise considerable expense and headache.