The Promise of Unified Communications

By Kathleen Ayres, Product Marketing Manager, InfoVista

Communication technologies in the workplace have changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. What started as an environment where most employees were tied to their desks has evolved into a mobile and geographically dispersed workforce due to advances in communications technology (corporate and private e-mail, SMS texting, instant messaging, Skype, voice mail…to name a few).

The speed and ease with which a workforce can communicate, share information, and collaborate is having a greater impact on the bottom line of every enterprise. Therefore, businesses are looking for ways to improve the overall quality and speed of interactions, ways to enhance individual and group productivity, as well as to reduce communications costs. [...]

John Chambers at Cisco has it Right—Innovation Requires Operational Excellence

By Manuel Stopnicki, CTO, InfoVista

At Cisco Live 2010 in Las Vegas, Cisco CEO and Chairman John Chambers gave a great keynote address that described the critical need for organizations to focus on operational excellence.

One of his key points was that there is no true innovation without operational excellence. He then described operational excellence as consisting of 4 pillars: Scale, Speed, Flexibility, and Duplication.

I think John has it right, and would add that in order to really innovate with velocity, sustainable operational excellence, and compelling ROI, the product approach is not the answer. To truly deliver on those 4 pillars of operational excellence, you’ll need to have a platform-centric architecture.

Over the last few years, service providers have evolved from connectivity service providers to full spectrum of IT services providers, offering Application-Aware VPN, Unified Communication, and Data Center services. Cloud based services denote the ultimate convergence of communication and application services.

The challenges that these offerings represent in term of service assurance are high but the rewards in term of revenue for the service provider are significant. Speed is of the essence.  As always, the revenue goes to the leaders.

We at InfoVista believe that the key to success is to leverage one platform that will allow for agile product deployment, enabling a first to market position that leads to premium revenue and ROI.

With this in mind, we are very proud to have recently announced our Vista360 solution, which in a very short time frame has won multiple awards and gained significant market adoption. Vista360 is core to our platform strategy and brings together for the first time in a seamless manner an understanding of end-to-end infrastructure and the services that flow on top of it. That platform has the intelligence to adapt to new technologies, like virtualization, and focus on how they are delivered to customers.

Today, the challenges for service providers is no longer to deliver business continuity for connectivity services but a first class customer experience for a whole set of advanced IT services.

Only a unified platform approach can enable innovation and operational excellence while harnessing the revenue potential of those new business opportunities for service providers and their customers.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Customer Experience Management – Everyone’s doing it apparently….or are they?

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

Recently, I’ve noticed more and more vendors are claiming to do “Customer Experience Management”. But I pose the question “are they?” or is it just a convenient phrase to align with for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

As far as Customer Experience is concerned, it’s more of a broad Service Provider focus than a product capability, where operators are adopting a focus on “quality of delivered services” to maintain customer satisfaction – rather than focusing on how the network can evolve and operate efficiently. This is a wise and important trend from the virtuous circle of service delivery, in that if you can maintain customer satisfaction high, chances of retention, new customer attraction and perpetual investment funding will also remain high.

Get customer experience right or watch out!!!!

A word-to-caution however, if for some reason these operators do not have a change of focus to maintain the “customer experience,” chances are that this virtuous circle could turn into a vicious cycle, where poor experience leads to bad press and churn, decreasing ROI in new service and technology, creating negative cash flow, reduced ARPU and limited future investment for growth and innovation.

Customer Experience can be defined as a combination of QoS and QoE. As most will know, the QoS side is very well supported in the network with class-of-service implementation, queue prioritization and numerous OAM techniques leveraged by InfoVista’s traditional performance management products and solutions. QoE, on the other hand, is made up of subscriber service & application awareness PLUS aspects over which billing process, CRM and helpdesk offer a significant contribution. Business Analytics is another key contributor to truly understanding the customer experience.

InfoVista claims a warranted Customer Experience story – but this is in regards to how we help support service providers and operators in transforming their approach to customer service management. InfoVista’s Vista360 enables providers to create and run SERVICE Operation Centres where the focus is very much biased towards the customer and the network, and our “unified” proposition for network and application performance management provides the glue to associate Customer Experience issues to underpinning network issues – which in turn will expedite troubleshooting, improve reaction times and ultimately assist in maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Timing is Everything

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Product Marketing Director, InfoVista

Imagine if Apple rested on its iPod success and brought us a brand new 4GB iPhone in 2010—with no App store.  Would they still be overflowing with so many preorders?

Timing is everything—and the principal also applies to service providers.

Today service providers are launching new offers based on mainstream technologies which happened to be available to the enterprise 4-5 years ago.  WAN Optimization capabilities are now offered as Optimization and Acceleration Services and IP-Telephony as Hosted Unified Communication.

Why such a delay in our industry technology life cycle? In a competitive market, price erosion makes it difficult to get an acceptable return on investment and targeting the late adopters is not the optimal way to generate profits. To maximize company profitability it’s not enough to follow the herd, but critical to launch services ahead of the curve. And the real challenge for every Product Manager has become to launch a unique service, ahead of their competition, so it can be charged with a premium and drain comfortable margin. [...]

How can the Telecom Industry Start Growing Again? Part II

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

In Part 1 of this series, I began a discussion of the thought-provoking ideas shared by Emily Nagle Green and Camille Mendler of Yankee Group during a recent briefing in London. Here’s some more of what I heard at the briefing.

Loving and leveraging the network

Benoît Felten, Principal Analyst at Yankee Group led a session that focused on how assets can be used to create new opportunities in the world of communication.

Historically in most countries around the globe, the State has supplied funding to assist the incumbent Telco in building out a communications infrastructure. The innovative way that the service provider created and sold services then contributed to the maintenance and upkeep of the network. [...]

How can the Telecom Industry Start Growing Again? Part I

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

On the tenth of June, I attended a briefing by our contracted analyst Yankee Group, in London. There were approximately 93 attendees ranging from large and medium service providers, to equipment and software vendors, to consultants and written press.

The president and CEO of Yankee Group – Emily Nagle Green – kicked off the session by introducing the “Anywhere” concept that Yankee has now been using as a continuous thought leadership theme for three years.

As we have seen in the evolution of mobile broadband in recent times, it’s clear that the concept of “Anywhere consumers” is very much aligned to the direction we have been travelling. Emily discussed that these days, communication expectations are high for businesses, business users, and consumers. Access to the internet, its services and applications, is fast becoming a communications baseline, and appetites are continually growing to access more, see more, and do more. [...]

Realizing the Benefits of Offering Mobile Data Services

By Ranga Thittai, Senior Product Manager, InfoVista

Providing data services can be a bit of a double-edged sword for mobile service providers. On the one hand, data services represent the fastest growing revenue stream for service providers, accounting for up to 50 percent of growth compared with the fairly flat growth from voice services. But on the other hand, the exploding volume of bandwidth-intensive mobile data traffic has made it difficult for operators to ensure the quality and availability of these data services. Failure to do so can have disastrous consequences when it comes to customer retention and revenue. With every dropped call, dropped packet, instance of jitter, or failed download, a mobile service provider risks losing subscribers and high-value business customers to the competition.

So, how can service providers take advantage of the revenue opportunities that delivering mobile data services presents without falling prey to poor quality and churn? [...]

Have We Learned from the iPhone? Part III

Achieving a Holistic Approach to Mobile Service Assurance

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

In my last blog, I talked about maintaining application quality in the face of rising data traffic and customer expectations (i.e. the rapid adoption of the iPhone). I also started to discuss how mobile quality of service is dependent upon performance across the multiple domains that a service can transition—meaning that providers should be employing a more holistic approach in operational environments.

How can providers achieve this holistic view? Let me start by giving a little background. InfoVista began by selling performance management solutions to mobile operators in order to monitor their IP transport networks. What we found was that in most cases, these operators would have vendor-specific solutions to monitor the mobile data environment plus alternative OSS tools for monitoring the radio access – RNC, BTS, etc. In order to achieve a holistic view in those cases, the choice is either to conduct a large scale integration project leveraging the recommended frameworks of the TMF or to organically grow single-silo solutions into other domains with patchwork style extensions. Either of these approaches will involve a dual investment in solutions and an expensive integration project to achieve the holistic view needed to support true end-to-end performance assurance. [...]

Have We Learned from the iPhone? Part II

Maintaining Application Quality in the Face of Rising Data Traffic and Customer Expectations

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

If we’ve learned anything from the rapid adoption of the iPhone, it’s this—capacity and bandwidth are quickly becoming both an expectation and a commodity. 

Service providers no longer face the choice of, “Do I or don’t I evolve my network to a next generation environment?” In order to move forward and compete in the mobile data services space, they’ve got to go to 3G+, and have their sights set on 4G/LTE.  Additionally, maintaining quality in application delivery is becoming more and more critical.

In my last blog post, I raised the question whether or not operators will be hesitant in taking on the iPad, considering the additional load that will likely be put on the network. My thoughts, it can be quite the opportunity for growth, just remember that the ability to quickly respond to rising data and customer expectations will be key. Here are just a few tips: [...]

Management World 2010 – “A Tale of Two Topics”

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

A gentle stroll around the newly relocated exhibition this year brought forward a realisation that apparently EVERYONE in the OSS market now provides Service Assurance…incredible!

In my last ten years at these events, you could expect to see the IBM-Micromuse-Netcool and EMC domination of fault management plus InfoVista and CA holding ground on the performance front, but with the blurring of Enterprise and Service Provider tool markets, evolution of Web2.0, and a need for probes to do more than just “probe”, Providers really are struggling to dig through the weeds to find a solution that truly matches their requirements. [...]