NetIQ Revamps VoIP Products

"What NetIQ has done is taken several things and succinctly tied them into a toolset we can efficiently use," said Vish Tadimety, president and CEO of Corliant, a Trevose, Pa, professional services firm. "[VoIP management was a lot more ad hoc in the past."

The Vivinet family of VoIP tools, formerly known as the NetIQ VoIP Manager Suite, includes Vivinet Diagnostics, a new troubleshooting tool which pinpoints network problems that contribute to poor call quality. Vivinet Diagnostics can trace the path of an IP call through the network, polling devices to collect performance data.

"We found that lots of people spend lots of time trying to hunt down problems and, as a result, pilots stall," said Steve Joyce, vice president of network technology at NetIQ, based here.

Vivinet Assessor 2.0 predicts the impact voice traffic will have on an IP network prior to deployment. The upgrade includes network-device inventory and modeling capabilities to project bandwidth requirements based on current and anticipated call volumes.

With Vivinet Assessor, solution providers can back up with hard data their network-upgrade recommendations to customers, said Scott Severson, director of services at Berbee Information Networks, Madison, Wis. "It helps put better logic, justification and reality into what our best intuition would be," Severson said.

Vivinet Manager 2.1 adds management capabilities for call centers, video-over-IP and unified messaging.

Vivinet Diagnostics, scheduled for general availability by the end of this month, costs $8,000. Vivinet Assessor 2.0, available now, costs $12,000, or $4,500 for a one-month license. Vivinet Manager 2.1 is priced at about $10,000 for a typical deployment.