Bloor Research has carried out an evaluation looking at four leading companies (CA, EMC, HP and IBM) in terms of their strategies and technologies for addressing network (fault and performance) management and voice management for major enterprises (dated February 2008). The report compared and contrasted their relative strengths and approaches. This paper is a summary focusing on CA’s approach and its Network and Voice Management (NVM) solution.

Bloor cannot overstate the importance of an integrated toolset for seamlessly managing and supporting the whole enterprise network and voice infrastructure. Problems occur, so the best tools need to: a) very rapidly pinpoint and correct existing faults and degraded performance, b) prevent problems occurring in the first place where possible, and c) handle network changes easily and automatically to minimize risks to live operation. To reduce management complexity, the ideal software set will also be easy to implement, update and use. These are the factors that provided the basis for Bloor’s software evaluation criteria.

The network management landscape
Enterprise networks are evolving rapidly. Once they had only to accommodate data transmission with a completely separate system for telephony. Then came integration with the internet and the rise of virtual private networks (VPNs) that exist conceptually above the physical infrastructure, followed by web services and all manner of transmissions using internet protocol (IP) format including, more recently, Voice over IP (VoIP).