Strategic initiative announced to support multiple IP communication platforms

PROGNOSIS software to provide single monitoring and diagnostics solution for multiple VoIP vendors’ technology

Integrated Research announced today a new strategic initiative to expand its IP telephony and Voice over IP (VoIP) management software to support three additional IP communication platforms.

The company’s flagship product, PROGNOSIS IP Telephony Manager, will be extended over the next twelve months to support IP telephony solutions from Avaya, Alcatel and Nortel.

“Today, our software is well established globally as the monitoring tool of choice for large-scale Cisco VoIP deployments,” said Keith Andrews, Chief Executive Officer for Integrated Research. “Several of our large customers are now urging us to extend PROGNOSIS to support a second and in some cases third VoIP platform.”

According to analyst group, Frost & Sullivan’s 2005 Enterprise Telephony Systems Market report, Avaya and Nortel’s combined share of the North American market is 38.8%. If added to Cisco’s 19.8% share this represents a total of 58.5% across all three vendors (see market figures below). In Europe, Alcatel has a significant share of the rapidly emerging VoIP market.

Table 1: Enterprise Telephony Systems Market - Total IP Telephony Market Share by Revenues (North America), 2005. (Source: Frost & Sullivan).

PROGNOSIS currently supports Cisco’s Unified CallManager IP telephony platform. With support for an additional three platforms, this potentially extends the market opportunity for PROGNOSIS more than threefold. With this new strategy, PROGNOSIS will offer enterprise and managed service provider customers a single view into these disparate IP communication systems, which together represent over 60 per cent of the global IP communication market.

The impetus for this initiative comes from current users of PROGNOSIS who are
looking to:

• Eliminate the need to procure and maintain multiple, IP-PBX specific management tools
• Reduce the time and expense involved in training network operations staff to use differing solutions
• Give operations staff a single, consistent view across all their disparate VoIP environments

Managed service provider (MSP) clients also will benefit by being able to offer the same service-level products to their customers, regardless of their IP communication platform.

Organizations adopt multiple platforms for a variety of reasons. In many cases, this is the result of a merger or acquisition. In other cases, companies specifically maintain multiple platforms to mitigate the risk of having a single vendor. Managed service providers, on the other hand, typically must support multiple platforms given their broad customer base.

“Enterprises increasingly use two or three IP telephony vendors, and the last thing they want is multiple management tools, each with their own interfaces and metrics,” said Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. “The multi-vendor trend is the result of M&A activity, regional decision-making among global companies, and the ability to leverage relationships with multiple vendors. Integrated Research’s multi-vendor approach responds to the need for a comprehensive IP telephony management solution for both enterprise and MSP deployments.”

Andrews adds, “Although IP communication vendor tools typically give companies some insight into their individual platforms, these tools do not combine multiple platforms into a single view, while also providing the depth of insight that clients tell us PROGNOSIS gives them. This move gives us a distinct competitive advantage to single vendor products, alongside providing the company with much broader market opportunities.”

PROGNOSIS is currently used to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot many of the world’s largest enterprise VoIP deployments in order to optimize call quality and ensure service reliability. This initiative is a logical extension to the existing, field-proven software architecture and further demonstrates Integrated Research’s commitment to this high-growth market.

Read more about PROGNOSIS IP Telephony Manager