City of Jacksonville Calls on Qovia to Maximize Its VoIP Investment.

FREDERICK, Md. -- Jacksonville, N.C.'s IT Team Uses Qovia Voice Monitoring and Management System (VMMS) to Support its Cisco VoIP Implementation

Qovia, Inc., the technology and market leader in enterprise Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) monitoring and management products, today announced that the City of Jacksonville, N.C., has purchased the Qovia(TM) Voice Monitoring and Management System (VMMS). The VMMS will enable the City of Jacksonville to monitor and manage its VoIP network to ensure call quality and reliability of its mission-critical phone system.

The City of Jacksonville installed a Cisco VoIP network in 2002 to upgrade its phone system and reduce calling charges for its nearly 400 users. The city's system includes two Cisco Call Manager servers, several Cisco switches and 250 Cisco handsets distributed across 14 remote sites, including City Hall, the police and fire stations, as well as the Public Services department and recreational facilities. Administrators quickly realized that they needed a real-time method for monitoring and managing voice quality and network reliability, so they recently installed the Qovia VMMS.

"We had the products in place to monitor the data side of the house, but we were running into issues on the voice side that the data products were not built to handle," said Bobby Parrish, senior IT specialist for the City of Jacksonville. "The addition of Qovia VMMS to our Cisco VoIP network provides a consolidated dashboard view of our entire voice network, alerting our IT team as anomalies occur. It's not only a cost saving measure, it's also insurance to keep our VoIP network clear and reliable. Qovia's combined capabilities allow us to manage our Cisco voice network with the same confidence we have in our data network."

Qovia VMMS: Enabling Broad Adoption

"Cisco is a dominant player in the VoIP marketplace and for companies looking to build a VoIP phone system from the ground up, Cisco is a clear choice," said Richard Bibb, Qovia's VP of Sales. "The thousands of companies that have chosen Cisco's AVVID VoIP products can now take advantage of Qovia's designed-from-the-ground-up VoIP monitoring and management capability. Qovia provides immediate ROI by lowering the operational cost of a VoIP network while acting as insurance against outages or loss of call quality. Qovia management tools give our customers confidence to deploy more VoIP phones faster."

In addition to the call quality issues, the Qovia VMMS also enables Parrish to address security concerns, specifically in regards to watching for rogue devices that could sap bandwidth and thereby create packet-loss problems.

Enterprise IT professionals can use Qovia VMMS to monitor all the critical aspects of their VoIP phone systems: voice quality, resource utilization and management, UPS status, etc. Using thresholds, they can then receive notification of anomalies or issues before performance issues affect callers. For Cisco resellers and channel partners, Qovia helps facilitate VoIP system sales by answering a major question about VoIP: "How do I monitor and manage my voice network to deploy more phones faster?"

About Qovia, Inc.

Qovia's Voice over IP Telephony monitoring and management technologies and products offer reliability, emergency services, quality, operations and security for enterprise VoIP phone systems. The Qovia(TM) VoIP Monitoring and Management System (VMMS), consists of a series of software tools that significantly ease management, monitoring and maintenance of Internet phone systems, protect data assets and increase the productivity of IT investments. Major OEM manufacturers are also offering VoIP monitoring and management tools that are "Powered by Qovia." Qovia was founded in June 2002 and has received $16.1M in venture funding from Canaan Partners; Nokia Venture Partners; Anthem Capital; and the State of Maryland. The company has earned several key industry awards, including INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine "Product of the Year"; a Maryland Tech Council "IT Product of the Year"; and "Best of Show" from among 450 companies exhibiting at the Federal Office Systems Exposition (FOSE). Qovia can be found online at www.qovia.com.