What motivated most companies to move their voice traffic to the enterprise IP wide area network (WAN) is mainly due to the fact that there was a slight possibility of it being more cost effective than any other network. Although later most of them found out that Voice over IP (VoIP) quality are not always suitable to business use.

Furthermore, as VoIP is launched to the network, the performance of other business-critical applications that are already at risk with the growing Web/Internet traffic, started to deteriorate even more. The challenge is to ensure that the performance of real-time VoIP calls while protecting business data that needs instant 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 an optimal user experience.

This application-aware, traffic-management solution should work with the existing IP network, and should assure the performance of individual VoIP calls and application flows. Policies should be accurate and application-aware, and tuning performance in both the inbound and outbound directions should be possible to ensure the integrity of each user connection.