The promise of lower cost has motivated many enterprises to move their voice traffic to the enterprise IP wide area network (WAN). Many have discovered, however, that Voice over IP (VoIP) quality does not always meet business use standards.

In addition, as VoIP is introduced to the network, the performance of other business-critical applications -- already at risk given growing Web/Internet traffic -- begins to deteriorate. The challenge is to assure the performance of real-time VoIP calls while protecting business data that requires immediate response times, in a manner that optimizes the efficiency of the WAN.

The growth in real-time and interactive business traffic that requires immediate response mandates a layer of application-aware control that intelligently links the performance requirements of a growing mix of converged data, VoIP and video applications with available network resources in a manner that assures.