Cisco Live! London: Service Quality Visualization Taking Hold

By Richard Higgins, Director of Worldwide Strategic Alliances, InfoVista

We’re busy gearing up for Cisco Live! in London, taking place next week from January 30 through February 3. Cisco’s flagship event has a well-deserved reputation as one of the industry’s most educational events for the networking industry. Built around four pillars – technical education, technology evaluation, networking and thought leadership –Cisco Live! Is  a great place to explore new technologies and get answers to unique questions.

This is an exciting time in the telecom field, and things seem to be moving more quickly every day. Technologies like Carrier Ethernet and mobile backhaul are all expanding at a rapid pace, and we at InfoVista are working tirelessly to remain at the forefront of the network performance management and application performance monitoring industry.

Of course, the million dollar question for operators today is how to differentiate from competitors and move away from being “dumb pipes” like we so often discuss. One way that we’ve seen business service providers and mobile operators (MNOs) accomplish this is with proactive and actionable service quality visualization, a huge focus at InfoVista and a topic that I’m eager to discuss with other Cisco Live! attendees next week.

With Service Quality Visualization, MNOs can get an all-encompassing, end-to-end view of their networks to forecast traffic growth , proactively prevent service quality degradation and demonstrate compliance to Service Level Objectives to current and potential customers. With that insight, they can easily and proactively improve network performance and service quality, and thus reduce churn.

Business service providers are relying on actionable service quality visualization to “proof-point” the value of their services to their enterprise customers, generate additional revenues with hands-on troubleshooting and premium reporting capabilities, and mitigate the risk of Service Level Agreement penalties.

We look forward to seeing you at Cisco Live! in London and discussing this issue and the many others facing operators today. InfoVista will be exhibiting as a Cisco Solution Developer and CDN Partner at booth #E85/E88, so please come by to meet with one of our experts. If you can’t make it to the event, you can also attend virtually.

Telecom Industry Predictions for 2012: A Big Year for Communications Service Providers

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

2012 is going to be a big year for communications service providers (CSPs) around the world. Though there is no way of knowing what will come to pass in the next 12 months, many industry players have made predictions about what’s to come. Common among them is the theme that, as smart phone data usage expands, networks are rising above capacity, and as a result, the quality of customers’ experiences is suffering. Therefore, many have said that this will be the year that CSPs move from their previously passive stance on quality of experience (QoE) and network performance to a more proactive one. This will likely be done by offering more value to customers through additional network services as a way to differentiate from competitors.

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New InfoVista Solution Helps Mobile Operators Transition to LTE and Assure Service Quality over All-IP Infrastructure

By Marc Lippe, Director of Field and Worldwide Marketing, InfoVista

According to a new Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) report, 285 mobile operators have committed to commercial LTE network deployments or are engaged in technology trials and testing. Although LTE is quickly becoming a popular solution to the growing demand for bandwidth fuelled by the explosive uptick in mobile data services, transitioning to its all-IP infrastructure, while ensuring the end-to-end performance of existing 3G networks and mobile services, is a complex process.

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Season’s Greetings: A Look Back on 2011

By Marc Lippe, Director of Field and Worldwide Marketing, InfoVista

Happy holidays! 2011 has been an exciting year here at InfoVista, full of exciting announcements, international conferences and a lot of interesting conversations with our customers regarding the network, service and application performance management needs. We’re also very excited about where the communications industry in heading in 2012, and have a few predictions of our own about what will make headlines next year.

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Video: How Wholesale Backhaul Service Providers and Mobile Network Operators Can Maximize the Benefits of Migrating to Ethernet Backhaul (Part 2)

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

As introduced in my blog post earlier this week, here is my interview with Ari Banerjee, senior analyst of Heavy Reading, on the topic of how service quality visualization powered by Vista360, InfoVista’s award-winning Web 2.0 performance assurance portal, can help wholesale backhaul service providers and mobile network operators maximize the benefits of migrating to Ethernet backhaul.

How Wholesale Backhaul Service Providers and Mobile Network Operators Can Maximize the Benefits of Migrating to Ethernet Backhaul (Part 1)

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

In a turbulent economic climate and commoditized industry, primarily driven by price erosion, many are wondering how wholesale providers can reinvent themselves to sustain their value and increase their margins.  Several industries went through a similar challenge and while none predicted a possible turn-around, smart innovators managed to make seismic shifts, enabling them to redefine the market and, at the same time, catapult themselves into a leading position. An example can be seen with Apple’s release of the iPod and iPhone, or when telecom companies began to offer Next Generation VPN services in replacement of legacy frame relay and ATM links.

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Vlog: How Service Differentiation Can Accelerate Carrier Ethernet Revenue

By Christopher Cullan, Product Marketing Manager, Business Services Solutions, InfoVista

Due to the rise of ‘dumb pipes,’ communications service providers (CSPs) need to ensure the delivery of high-bandwidth and high-quality service to end-users and can thus accelerate Carrier Ethernet revenue. By combining service-level specifications and bandwidth profiles of Carrier Ethernet with service quality visualization, operators can ensure a high quality of experience (QoE) for end users and ensure that service expectations are consistently met, if not exceeded.

There are many ways for a CSP to differentiate their services, including offering something unique and different from competitors to generate revenue. In fact, this is critical to customers’ QoE. CSPs must implement service differentiation, which allows them to increase competitive service offerings, minimize churn and boost revenue.

There are three kinds of service differentiators that CSPs can employ: price, performance and offering. It’s important for a CSP to incorporate all three of these aspects because it will allow them to offer better quality and more cost-effective Carrier Ethernet. Check out this video for further information on why this is such an important topic:

Being the Difference: How Operational Excellence Underpins Market Differentiation

By Christopher Cullan, Product Marketing Manager, Business Services Solutions, InfoVista

One of the biggest challenges facing today’s communications service providers (CSPs) is achieving market differentiation. Essentially, this means that they have to successfully navigate the transition from providing ‘dumb pipes’ to creating and delivering high-margin services, like application-aware networking, Carrier Ethernet-based services and cloud. So how can CSPs ultimately get there? [...]

Management World Americas: What Constitutes the ‘Customer Experience’?

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

As I previously mentioned, TM Forum’s Management World Americas took place this week. The conference agenda was a busy one, with some nice traffic to our Catalyst stand in Forumville and informative presentations from more than 100 speakers across seven different summits covering everything from the race to cloud services to delivering agile IT and operations to optimizing the customer experience.

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Management World Americas: 3 ‘Musts’ for Fueling Service Providers’ Performance

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

Yesterday marked the official kick-off of TM Forum’s Management World Americas, taking place November 8-10 in Orlando, Florida. This year’s theme is about fueling innovation and new revenues and answering the question: “How can service providers effectively deliver and assure profitable, new offerings?”

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