"Why Should My CIO Care About Session Management?""Why Should My CIO Care About Session Management?"

It's the classic pair of reasons: Save money and deploy more advanced services. Here's a recap on how.

I know I said that my next post would be about security and I do intend to keep that promise. Security is certainly an important topic and the threats to enterprise VoIP services are both increasing and becoming increasingly complex.

However, at the recent Enterprise Connect event several people asked me the same question: "Why should my CIO care about session management?"

As it seems to be a question that is on a lot of minds, I thought it made sense to dedicate one more No Jitter blog post to explaining why C-level executives need to care about session management.

Let's start with a couple of general assumptions about what drives the decision-making process for many CIOs:

* The demand to keep costs down: We've all heard CIOs say they're being asked to do more with less. They are responsible for smaller IT/Telecom departments and are requiring their employees to find ways to simplify network architecture. Removing this complexity has a direct impact on the cost of running and maintaining the network.

* The demand to provide new communications services to employees quickly: In a move that seems diametrically opposed to demand number one, CIOs are being tasked with delivering new unified communications applications (typically IP-based) to give their organization a competitive edge or increase its productivity. Whether deploying unified communications, audio and video conferencing, video streaming, or several other services, CIOs and their teams are facing a daunting challenge.

It's a conundrum faced every day by technology executives--you have less money and are being asked to provide a competitive edge for your business--so what can you do? Well, that's the joy of session management. By implementing an overlay session architecture (see my previous posts here and here) the IT team can better leverage all of your existing infrastructure to easily connect users, applications and communications throughout the entire network--achieving the goal of doing more with less, and leveraging previous investments to boot.

In a nutshell, session management allows you to:

* Decrease the costs of both Infrastructure and Infrastructure management
* Increase network operational flexibility by providing advanced per-session-based control
* Provide a single point for managing security and compliance for communications services worldwide
* Provide a competitive edge through enhanced customer communications and business analytics
* Increase business user productivity by providing new communications services quickly.

These things should be compelling enough for a CIO to want to take the next step and learn more about session management and how it would apply in their networks.

So next time--security--I promise!