Small Business VoIP

Cymphonix has announced that Kirby-Smith Machinery, a construction equipment dealer for cranes and heavy equipment for contractors, has installed Cymphonix (News - Alert) Network Composer appliance to manage network traffic.

 

With this, the construction equipment company has enabled voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) use across its five locations in North Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Southern Illinois.

 

“Choosing to manage our bandwidth instead of investing in another T1 connection has proven to be a viable solution for our lagging network speeds,” said William Graham, IT administrator for Kirby-Smith Machinery, in a statement. “The biggest benefit has been the ability to throttle and control Internet traffic so that our VoIP system doesn't get overrun. We've given VoIP top priority within our network and effectively resolved our issues and eliminated user complaints across our organization.”

 

This is a new system for Kirby-Smith Machinery. The construction equipment dealer had been using Websense's (News - Alert) SurfControl as an online content filter.

 

“The Cymphonix Network Composer is extremely easy to install and use. I can quickly pull and forward reports to our human resource department and department managers so they can review the information and take necessary disciplinary action if needed,” Graham added. “It has eliminated the stress on our management staff because they no longer have to manually monitor employee activity now that we have a reliable device to do it for us.”

 

Due to heavy traffic on the company’s network, the product became overloaded almost daily. SurfControl left holes in the Internet monitoring capabilities and access controls of the construction equipment dealer, Cymphonix said.

 

The volume of network traffic became heavy and complaints about the inefficiency of their VoIP service reached the IT department.

 

In this context, the IT department opted for an investigation on network usage. Kirby-Smith Machinery found that users accessing non-work related Web content throughout the day impeded network speeds and limited bandwidth available for VoIP and other business-critical applications.

 

Following this, the company opted against increasing in bandwidth. Instead, they decided to invest in a solution with the ability to fully manage and prioritize Web traffic.

 

Cymphonix Network Composer revealed that a large percentage of employees spent excessive amounts of time on sports-related Web sites. This information was used to implement rules specific to this type of traffic ultimately reducing the negative impact these sites had on the network.