Living With Licenses And Software Control
By Gary Audin
Published August 2007; Posted April 2008

Abstract:

As the telephony world moves to a software model, you’ll be dealing with new problems - including version control and the proliferation of patches.

The video game Pac Man had the player, through the little round yellow character, devouring the screen items. If you were not fast enough, you lost. I would try again and do better, but I never became proficient.

The same can be said about VOIP software releases, versions and patches. The software comes at you. You install the software for new features and functions, or hoping that you have avoided or fixed a functional or security problem. When you are finished with the software installation, more arrives - especially patches.

You will never be quite sure if you have won or lost the software update game. But if you do not take control of the software installation process, then it will control your time and budget and lead to a lot of user dissatisfaction.

To learn the details of exactly what you face, we sent a detailed software survey out to 12 VOIP/IP-telephony vendors to collect information relating to the impact that software changes would have on the enterprise. Avaya, Nortel, Alcatel- Lucent, Inter-Tel, Aastra Intecom, NEC and Sphere Communications responded. Cisco, Siemens, 3Com, Mitel and ShoreTel did not respond to the survey.

Information was collected from the non-responding vendors’ websites to attempt to complete the picture. Although not all respondents answered all questions, enough information was collected to satisfy the goals of the survey.

The survey results were not collected to compare one vendor to another. The survey was concerned with the enterprise issues that surface with all the changes that the enterprise has to confront as software is produced by the VOIP/IP-telephony vendors.
 

About the author:

Gary Audin is a communications consultant and trainer (for BCR VOIP seminars) and is a regular speaker at the VoiceCon conferences.

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