VoIP is the dominant approach that IT organizations are taking relative to new deployments of enterprise voice systems. VoIP offers a number of cost advantages as well as strategic advantages through the integration of voice communications with various data applications. While the transition will take a few years to complete, it's possible to foresee a day when all voice traffic over enterprise networks (and even public networks) will be based on VoIP.

However, the addition of voice traffic to an enterprise IP data network poses a number of organizational and technical challenges. The key to meeting these challenges and successfully deploying VoIP is to follow a well-planned management process that has been proven successful by early adopters of VoIP and in the more general context of optimization of the performance of critical enterprise data applications over the LAN/WAN. As detailed in this white paper, some of the key steps in this process include:

• Model the impact of adding VoIP traffic to the network prior to deployment
• Implement the required network upgrades
• Monitor the ongoing performance of the VoIP traffic
• Track bandwidth consumption
• Map the VoIP traffic to the underlying network elements
• Identify degraded or failed network elements
• Quantify the impact of degraded or failed network elements
• Perform rapid root cause analysis