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.

We all know that operating a new service is a complex exercise, that our industry is evolving towards offering performance based SLAs, sometimes tailored per customers, which increases the challenge to quickly productize those services. As such, to accelerate the adoption of innovative technologies, it is even more critical to be equipped with a flexible OSS platform that provides the ability to easily and quickly provision services, and measure and report on today’s performance based SLAs.

Our recent survey with business services executives confirmed that time to market is their main concern. Additionally, when selecting a solution for a new service, solution tailoring and scalability are their main criteria. (Participants included product marketing, product management, or OSS executives from tier one and tier two service providers worldwide)

Cisco Live! is an opportunity to discover the technology which will define tomorrow’s leaders. Data Center Virtualization , Private Clouds, or solutions such as telepresence, are disruptive technologies adopted by enterprises to not only reduce IT CAPEX, but to also accelerate the delivery of critical business applications and to increase Business Units efficiency and productivity by offering new ways of collaboration. It also offers ways for service providers to capture new customers and create new revenue streams which can be highly profitable . . . if services are timely launched.

We are looking forward to meeting you at Cisco Live! and to demonstrate our next generation performance assurance platform that provides the flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and the ease of use required to securely productize and launch successful services in weeks—not in years.

And don’t miss InfoVista’s CTO, Manuel Stopnicki, who’s been passionate about performance assurance for the past 15 years, as he presents how InfoVista’s multitenant and elastic platform allows to timely secure the launch of cloud based services.