By Ranga Thittai

One way to drive down these per-bit costs is by leveraging Carrier Ethernet technology as the transmission medium for handling the exploding volume of backhaul traffic—instead of traditional TDM, which simply does not scale in terms of cost benefits. However, the introduction of an Ethernet-based mobile backhaul network is a tricky affair and involves, what I call, several “indispensable considerations.” Here are a few to consider:

•    First, it is critical to appropriately size the infrastructure components that constitute the network—because not being able to do so defeats the whole purpose behind moving to a flexible and scalable technology: i.e., cost containment. Furthermore, rightsizing is not a one-time activity; it is an ongoing process to keep up with new traffic patterns that may result from disruptive business decisions (e.g., the introduction of iPhones) or user and demographic behavior (e.g., New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve).

•    Second, while rightsizing is important toward staying aligned with the objective of cost containment, the aspect that needs to be balanced in parallel is quality of experience. Customers who have signed up for expensive data service packages, especially those traveling on business, expect a certain quality of user experience. When they don’t get it, they become a strong candidate for churn—and will likely switch to a competitor. What complicates the matter is that reduced infrastructure investment invariably leads to a degraded quality of experience for end users. So, not only is it important to perpetually rightsize the network infrastructure, but also to ensure that the appropriate quality of experience is preserved. Furthermore, there are stringent quality benchmarks imposed by packet-based synchronization standards and techniques, like IEEE 1588v2 or adaptive clock recovery, for the purposes of synchronization and timing in order to carry out the basic functions of a cellular network, such as cell-to-cell hand-offs.

•    A third key consideration is the radio access network (RAN) and its criticality to the delivery of voice and data services. Although operators embrace Carrier Ethernet to “future-proof” against explosive data growth and next-generation mobile networks (4G), they still have to support their legacy 2G and even early 3G radio networks, which use legacy transport formats like TDM or ATM. This is where pseudowire or circuit emulation technologies are enabling operators to seamlessly support legacy transmission interfaces over a pure Carrier Ethernet network. Nevertheless, transport connections to individual cell sites are still prone to multiple problems ranging from weather to careless configuration changes. While the operations team traditionally managed the tools that tested the legacy connectivity, it now needs similar tools to assure the availability and quality of such emulated connections over Carrier Ethernet.

•    Last but not least, Carrier Ethernet, as compared with traditional TDM, brings more complex concepts like classes of service, VLANs, virtual circuits, and MPLS tunnels. Although operators entrust the assurance of the mobile backhaul to the same transmission teams that managed TDM backhaul, they need to ensure that those teams are also equipped with the right tools that can assure and engineer all these entities holistically.

So how should mobile operators respond to these “indispensable considerations?” They should start by seeking a solution that provides proactive performance management and reporting capabilities across a multi-vendor Carrier Ethernet environment and mobile domain. Equipped with such a solution, they can realize the business objectives behind Ethernet backhaul while ensuring the all important quality experience end users demand from their mobile services.

To find out more, please download my white paper—or check out the related Pipeline article “Leveraging Ethernet Backhaul to Fight Churn,” by my InfoVista colleague, Chief Technology Officer Manuel Stopnicki.

By Ranga Thittai
Senior Product Manager
InfoVista

A key component in the success of mobile service providers is application performance management, which includes the ability to view an application and its response time—whether it’s in the form of streaming and real-time data services, such as mobile TV, push-to-talk, mobile-to-mobile games, or the critical enterprise applications on which business users rely.

If mobile operators want to truly differentiate themselves from the competition, maintain customer satisfaction, prevent churn, and fully capitalize on the growing demand for mobile data services, they need to look at application assurance in a broader context. In this respect, assuring quality of experience (QoE) on content and applications in conjunction with real-time performance visibility into the associated end-to-end infrastructure is the most effective approach.

Mobile customers don’t care if their inability to access an application is related to a third-party Internet service provider (ISP) or content provider—they are going to hold the mobile service provider responsible for the failure. This means mobile operators have the obligation to continually monitor application experience as perceived by end users and also monitor the performance levels coming from their application partners and ISPs.

Mobile application performance management by itself can detect and pinpoint poor application and content experience, but it cannot further troubleshoot the reasons behind that poor experience. This is why mobile operators also need enhanced visibility into each of the network entities along the path of application delivery in order to ensure their customers’ QoE.  These network entities could include firewalls, load balancers, routers, switches, IP connections, and more, going all the way out to the radio access network (RAN).

So, to get the most value out of any mobile application performance system, mobile operators need to complement that system with appropriate proactive network troubleshooting capabilities as well.

To discover more on this topic, check out one of my recent articles in Wireless Week titled “Application Assurance Is Critical to Retaining Subscribers.”

Rather than acquiring costly additional network bandwidth, today’s enterprises are turning to the merits of WAN optimization. This enables them to compress traffic from applications such as data backup, private LANs, and certain sales tools so they can preserve sufficient network bandwidth for more real-time, quality-sensitive voice, video, and collaboration applications.

While WAN optimization offers great advantages, managing the required devices internally can be a major, costly undertaking, particularly in large enterprise network environments. For this reason, many large enterprises are entrusting the management of their WANs to managed service providers. Doing so allows an enterprise to attain operational and cost efficiencies in its IT department and empowers IT to focus its efforts on supporting the company’s core business.

For managed service providers, the opportunity to increase revenue through the delivery of managed WAN services comes with network and application performance management challenges. For instance, if an enterprise is going to outsource the management of its WAN, it’s going to expect that the traffic over that WAN will be optimized and that the managed environment can handle any type of application which enterprise users throw at it.

To meet these challenges, Cisco and InfoVista have come together to offer WAN optimization and assurance for large enterprises and the managed service providers that serve them.

If you would like to learn more, additional information is available here.

Cyril Doussau de Bazignan

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Product Marketing Director, InfoVista

In a recent report by Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), EMA evaluated 18 vendors providing application-aware network performance management solutions.  As Jim highlights in his report, these 18 vendors represent a significant number of application-aware network performance management (ANPM) providers and demonstrate the increased relevance of the ANPM discipline, also known as service performance assurance.

To be included in the report and to be recognized as truly application-aware, vendors needed to offer all four of the following functionality categories:

• The ability to discover, recognize and monitor performance at the application level
• The ability to provide some troubleshooting and analysis, which allows IT organizations to reduce mean time to repair
• Capacity planning, which the report defines as “detailed insights into how the network is being used and what (and who) is driving traffic growth”
• Collaborative reports and dashboards

We were pleased by how well our carrier-class platform scored under the scrutiny of enterprise criteria: EMA assessed us a “Strong Value” overall and ranked us “high” (Top 3 overall) in terms of relative vendor strength and “above average” in relative cost efficiency.  The EMA report confirms InfoVista’s successful strategic execution in bringing to market, two years ago, a unified network and application performance assurance platform that fits the needs of large enterprises and service providers.

Because enterprises need to satisfy their business users’ requirements for new collaborative solutions that provide a competitive edge, while also ensuring high quality on existing business-critical applications, demand for visibility at the application and end-user levels continues to grow significantly.  At the same time, enterprises need to keep a lid on their IT and network spending.  Hence, the report validates several key trends:

• Assessing the quality of experience of business users and lines of business is now a must-have for IT
• The new performance assurance standards impose some service modeling capabilities that enable companies to assess how well IT is supporting the business
• Ease of use and collaboration capabilities for the various groups within IT and IT’s service constituencies are becoming key decision criteria when selecting a performance assurance platform
• Interoperability and the ability to implement some automatic adjustments to changing “environmental” conditions are important criteria to assure a low TCO

On the third bullet point, InfoVista’s unified network and application performance management dashboard received kudos in the EMA report, which stated “InfoVista’s Vista360 sets the pace for graphically rich, intuitive dashboards, featuring live data and rapid navigation plus full configurability to serve virtually any internal or external constituency in a secure manner.”

Do not hesitate to contact us and we would be glad to also share the profile on InfoVista that EMA did in relation to the ANPM report.

Never before has application performance played such a critical role in determining where customers will buy their MPLS VPNs. It all started about five years ago, when forward-thinking service providers began offering application performance management as a service on top of MPLS VPNs, enabling them to transform their traditional VPN services into advanced business services and thereby realize higher service uptake than those that did not.

In the next evolutionary step, many service providers will move toward cloud-based hosted services, which they see as the most cost-effective and profitable method of delivering services. Unified communications is one example of an evolving cloud-based service and it represents a major shift by service providers in terms of how they will manage these hosted services.

While the concept of hosting unified communications applications, such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, in the data center is not a new one, the practice of hosting unified communications applications on virtual machines in the cloud is. Cisco is a pioneer in this evolution to simplify the hardware and service infrastructure via cost-effective virtualized platforms and by making provisioning and operations easier. This enables service providers to host multiple customers on a single server, greatly reducing the service providers’ cost, implementation time, and operations.

However, managing and monitoring a unified communications service on a virtualized infrastructure introduces another layer of complexity that will challenge service providers. As a result, service providers will find it advantageous to manage both the service and the virtualized infrastructure as a holistic system. For this, they need a unified network and application performance management solution that enables them to:

• Collect, analyze and report correlating performance data from different technical domains and layers
• Assure and report user service quality in a cost-effective, multitenant environment
• Link applications to the infrastructure components they’re running on
• Observe service trends and plan capacity

I recently sat down with Georgina Schaefer of Cisco to discuss monitoring and assuring cloud-based unified communications services. We shared our insights on the market and the challenges service providers face. I invite you to view the video blog below, and as always, I would love to hear your opinion.

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.

Unified Communications (UC) provides an answer to these needs. UC offers the promise of simplified business communication, enhanced productivity, and reduced costs by eliminating boundaries between fixed-line phones, mobile devices, and messaging systems.

Currently, analysts are seeing an increased interest by enterprises in UC. Although the VoIP market was affected by the global economic recession in 2008 and 2009, as were most industries, analysts are now seeing a recovery trend, which is expected to continue to grow. Overall, the market for combined managed and hosted VoIP/UC services is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9% for the 2010-2014 time period. Analysts are reporting an especially positive outlook for the hosted VoIP/UC service model (12%CAGR for Hosted vs. about a 5% for the Managed IP PBX model for this same time period).  So, it appears that the greatest momentum will be for hosted VoIP services.

In fact, Cisco recently expanded on its UC solutions including the Cius (industry’s first mobile business collaboration tablet),  as well as its Hosted Collaboration solution, both announced at Cisco Live! Las Vegas this past June.

While the promises and benefits of UC are great, it’s important to keep in mind that deploying UC technologies and services is no simple task, regardless of the choice of UC provider (managed service provider, hosted service provider, or the enterprise itself). Each must address a common set of challenges and requirements associated with ensuring high-quality UC services, including:

• Keeping the quality of the user experience high and maintaining each customer’s expected service levels
• Monitoring a complex and interdependent UC infrastructure
• Properly managing and reporting on the many customers serviced in the managed or hosted UC services environment
• Getting visibility into the service performance delivered to a specific business’s organizational hierarchy – their divisions and locations
• Understanding changing utilization patterns for effective service growth and resource planning

In considering the potential UC services offer, you can’t help but imagine a world where you’d spend more time communicating and less time managing those communications. However, in order to get there, the ability to ensure a quality user experience will prove vital to the success of the UC services delivered—and effective performance management becomes a critical requirement.

I welcome your thoughts!

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we now take a look at deployed business models by comparison we can see that these service providers tend to generate their biggest revenues with moderate and high cost services but to a defined market and (in most cases) regional demographic. The other key provider market that is playing a significant part in the communications evolution is the cloud services provider who will typically create their biggest revenues with very low cost services and applications being offered to the global market across all regions and demographics.

Another observation made by Benoît is that operators have historically not been the best innovators, generally due to the size and complexity of the, sometimes slow moving, organizations. Internet-based operators on the other hand have the latest technology at their fingertips, such as Web 2.0, and the freedom to create services or applications that the user wants in a very short time-to-market.

The facts are that these days a country’s “State” is very unlikely to invest in the plethora of private providers and operators in terms of innovation or infrastructure, so it’s up to those organizations to look at ways to reinvent themselves. This is great justification for collaboration between peered networks, and innovation outsourcing to dynamic and technology savvy partners. The combined contribution would create an “Anywhere” opportunity with extended reach, scope, and user alignment.

Farewell flat rate

Declan Lonergan, Vice President at Yankee Group, tackled another discussion to complete a very rounded view of opportunities for the Telecom industry by looking at the way we view and manage Anywhere-aligned billing transformation.

In a similar fashion to how Camille had discussed evolution demand and gluttony (see Part 1), Declan observed that we have transitioned from a state of over-supply and under-demand, to where we are now with under-supply and over-demand. This will only be compounded by the launch of iPhone 4.0 and its video-calling capability – to be followed with other “iClones” with the same feature enrichment over the next twelve months. Intelligent management of network capacity versus demand is absolutely key.

Another interesting point from Declan had to do with Anywhere mobility. If subscribers are buying a service (be it handset or laptop-3G dongle), the expectation will very soon be all calls, all applications, all media and all contacts available everywhere at anytime – or in other words roaming and restrictive tariffs need to become more intelligent. Networks and roaming partner networks know when you travel, they know where you are and in the case of the home service provider, they know what services you have bundled.

Is the next step to be more user friendly and aligned, to dynamically adjust tariffs based on work-life pattern? Let’s face it, we know the capability is in the network – but can the OSS and Billing platform cope?

Options for a restart

So from the briefing, Yankee Research recommends that there are three main areas that could bring a restart to the Telecom industry. The first is go-to-market innovation by leveraging cloud-based technology & services and the wholesale and partnering opportunities that can be built. The second is network sharing and innovation or peering and partnering for success, leveraging a commoditized infrastructure to create competition and value at the services and application delivery level. The third and final area is intelligent billing and more innovation surrounding automated tariffs based on user type, geography, and situation.

A key takeaway that lends itself to this entire discussion is the need to refresh the OSS in the form of strategic deployment aligned to customer experience management. If the infrastructure – both network and data center – is becoming a commodity and the access domain has reached the right level of maturity, it makes sense to deploy OSS platforms with a holistic view and comprehension of services and applications.

InfoVista offers a multi-domain, holistic performance assurance perspective that aligns itself with these “next generation” requirements and trends, including a customer experience linked operational dashboard that can aid the triggering of a telecommunications reboot.

As always, I invite your thoughts. Additionally, with the Yankee Group’s significant research and commentary linking to the Anywhere revolution, I encourage you to visit their site for more information.