Investing in Best of Breed Performance Assurance Platforms Increases Service Profitability
Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Product Marketing Director, InfoVista
Managed service providers (MSPs) are seeking to increase their profitability and market share by offering innovative services that enable large enterprises to optimize the cost of managing their IT and network infrastructures, while at the same time ensuring the optimum delivery of mission-critical applications. As an extension of their virtual private networks (VPNs) and application-aware VPNs, many MSPs now offer new innovative services, such as those built around datacenter management, and infrastructure as services.
MSPs that will succeed in this transformation are those that will contain the cost of launching and administering these new service offerings, which rely on the most complex technologies to date. Unified communication or virtualization makes clear economic sense, but they provide operations with some unprecedented management headache! MSPs must therefore invest in innovative solutions that enable the sharing of CAPEX and OPEX among customers, provide each of their user communities the actionable information they need to perform, and which are hosted on a platform designed to support growth.
Choosing the right OSS solution is critical, as a service ROI will only be realized with a successful service launch supported by efficient management and assurance solutions that are in line with the MSP’s business processes. Because each MSP attempts to differentiate its service offerings in order to attract the largest number of potential customers, each one has a unique set of requirements. Architects and engineering teams need to be in phase with the service definitions provided by product management teams, which imposes a need for in-depth flexibility and adaptability on the OSS.
In light of all this, achieving the goal of accelerated service ROI will require an OSS platform that has been natively designed to support multiple clients in a secure manner (multi-tenant) and which offers template-based profile capabilities so that the needs for each service and each user community (product managers, product marketing, capacity planners, engineers) can be fulfilled. A positive benefit of having one solution for many services and user communities is that additional savings will be realized in back-office integration, consulting, and training. As long as the OSS solution is capable of overcoming constraints related to servers and network virtualization technologies (such as those brought about by VPNs, network address translations (NAT) or virtual machines management), the service ROI will be accelerated when additional customers are added to the platform,
MSPs are not traditional enterprises, which means innovative yet proven solutions are the key to containing OSS project costs. The solutions must have the demonstrated ability to be deployed on time and on budget and should be optimized to automatically take into consideration infrastructure provisioning changes so management cost does not eradicate the service ROI.
Our experience in assisting MSPs with their service assurance strategies has made it clear that the service ROI is further accelerated thanks to the savings brought on by right-sizing the infrastructure and taking into consideration revenues generated by selling new, innovative reporting services to high-valued customers. The benefits of leveraging a multi-service, multi-tenant performance solution are real and should not be overlooked.
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