By Richard Higgins, Director of Worldwide Strategic Alliances,

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.

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

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.

Adding to the current chatter around this topic, we at InfoVista have some 2012 predictions of our own:

1) In order to differentiate themselves in the current marketplace, CSPs will continue incorporating network performance and service quality visualization into their service offerings. By allowing customers to visualize and report on the end-to-end performance of their mobile networks in real time, CSPs can provide additional, marketable value to customers, offering improved network performance and higher ROI.

2) Similarly, Carrier Ethernet has often been used as an alternative to mitigate the effects of high mobile traffic because of its low cost per byte. However, many CSPs are finding it difficult to measure and assure the QoS of this new transport network. In 2012, we are expecting increased implementations of service assurance solutions that visualize Ethernet performance and accelerate wireless backhaul migration by empowering staff to make optimal decisions at key points in the backhaul network lifecycle.

3) Finally, we predict that self-organizing networks (SON) will be widely-used by mobile network operators (MNOs) in 2012. As the number of networks that MNOs manage continues to grow (2G, 3G and now 4G/LTE), they will be in need of a cost-efficient strategy to simultaneously augment current network capacity and assure the customer experience. SON automatically configures network systems, allows capacity gains, maximizes performance and remediates network glitches and degradation – without any human intervention. This automation frees up engineers’ time and focus to allow for more innovative work, rather than bogging them down with constant network degradation issues.

Only time will tell which of these predictions come true, so fasten your seatbelts for the year to come. Happy New Year and best of luck in 2012!

By Marc Lippe, Director of Field and Worldwide Marketing,

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.

Mobile operators need to assure the quality of real-time, synchronous mobile services and applications over asynchronous IP, and overcome traditional network management silos that inhibit monitoring end-to-end service quality. They also have to efficiently collect massive amounts of vendor-specific LTE raw data to generate meaningful and actionable performance indicators and dashboards.

To help mobile operators overcome these challenges and successfully transition to LTE, InfoVista is pleased to announce the availability of a single, unified service performance assurance solution capable of monitoring the entire 4G and 3G ecosystems to ensure subscribers’ quality of experience (QoE) from the NGN Evolved packet core to IP backhaul to the Evolved RAN (E-UTRAN).

An extension of our long-standing expertise in the IP and Carrier Ethernet performance assurance space, InfoVista’s Service Performance Assurance Solution for LTE provides RAN engineering and operations with the flexibility and visibility needed to quickly resolve service-affecting problems and better assure network availability. Its actionable, out-of-the-box KPIs and KQIs, advanced analysis features and reporting capabilities also help mobile operators improve operational efficiencies and optimize IT costs.

The capabilities of LTE are certainly vast and exciting, from faster data transfer speeds, faster response time and multiple classes of services; however, the success of mobile operators’ transitions will be determined by their ability to manage network performance and deliver a high QoE to subscribers. We look forward to discussing service assurance for LTE and the several proof-of-concepts InfoVista currently has underway in the coming months.

By Marc Lippe, Director of Field and Worldwide Marketing,

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.

First, a quick recap of what happened at InfoVista this year:

• We released our new Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solution at Cisco Live, providing a complete set of capabilities for holistic monitoring across cloud infrastructure, services and applications.
• We participated in TM Forum’s “Enhanced Cloud Service Management” Catalyst at Management World and Management World Americas, demonstrating how communications service providers can proactively manage end-to-end cloud service quality and delivery.
• We were awarded the 2011 Frost & Sullivan Global Customer Service Leadership Award in Network Performance Management and the 2011 Internet Telephony Unified Communications Excellence Award. We were also included in Gartner’s APM Magic Quadrant.
• We announced a UC partnership with En Pointe, which will deliver a next-generation UC&C offering that guarantees a high level of quality of service (QoS), performance monitoring and scalability.

Looking forward to 2012, it is already clear that LTE will be a hot topic. However, we believe that LTE will not be the focus of mobile network operators and wireless service providers, no matter how widely implemented. Instead, we are looking towards the growth of network optimization across 2G and 3G networks, leading to overall increased capacity. This is, after all, a much more cost-effective solution to the expensive and labor-intensive LTE movement.

We are already planning some exciting announcements for next spring and looking specifically into the areas of application-aware VPNs, Carrier Ethernet and mobile backhaul. I invite you to join MyInfoVista to learn more about what we’re up to in the coming months and interact with InfoVista employees.

Happy holidays and a happy New Year!

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.

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Director of Product Marketing,

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.

The primary issues in the telco industry are the time and cost associated with bringing innovations to market. Rolling out communication services takes years.  It requires months of planning to stay ahead of the curve. But how complex is it to bring to market the breakthroughs that would redefine the space? We all know that the path of discovering differentiated features, capable of defining tomorrow’s winner, begins with listening to customers. By working closely with MNOs’ customers, we’ve become aware of their frustration with managing Ethernet-based backhaul networks because they lack the visibility required to offer high QoE to their subscribers. When MNOs lease Ethernet Backhaul, the traditional VPN reports that were designed for large enterprises are not sufficient, as MNOs require a deeper understanding of the performance of their backhaul in real-time and in the relation to their adjacent networks. Because MNOs are feeling blind in this regard, there is a clear opportunity for wholesale providers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace based on more than just price.

Wholesale providers are coming to realize that by packaging innovative service quality visualization into their existing products, they can differentiate themselves from competitors, resulting in a leading market position. But the question is: who will be the first to seize this opportunity and market those capabilities? To learn more about this passionate topic, look for my interview with Ari Banerjee, senior analyst of Heavy Reading, later this week.

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

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:

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?

The key to offering these types of services—and profiting from them—is operational excellence. Like TM Forum has suggested, operational excellence can be broken down into three main areas: cost reduction, which helps with the margin squeeze and enables some pricing flexibility; operational agility, which enables CSPs to rapidly respond to market changes; and efficiency improvement, which allows CSPs to do everything better and faster.

When looking at what works and what doesn’t to establish operational excellence and support CSPs’ business goals, standardization is essential. By breaking down heavily siloed and proprietary technologies and processes, CSPs can shift from customization to configuration and open interfaces that simplify integration—and ensure that their operations / IT run like well-oiled machines. And this success more than always comes down to a common OSS/BSS architecture that enables repeatable processes, which then drive automation, resulting in both tangible cost reductions as well as efficiency improvements.

Collaboration is also at the heart of an OSS/BSS framework that supports operational excellence. Enabling all CSP organizations (engineering, operations, product management, customer care, etc.)—and empowering each functional area—to make decisions based on the same information is critical. This can accelerate adoption, which can, in turn, lead to organizations not only doing things well, but doing the right things.

Operational excellence can be the difference between success or failure. With these components, CSPs are enabled to provide real value to their customers and effectively differentiate today.

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.

In the latter summit, there was one particularly interesting session, led by Sean Allbee of Ericsson ConsumerLab, that discussed segmenting service providers’ customer bases, analyzing what services they are currently consuming and how their future usage will change in the coming years with the emergence of 4G, and determining how they define the customer experience. Sean even brought in a panel of consumers to talk about whether or not they bring their smartphones to bed, for example.

Some of the points during the presentation that stood out included:

• Mobile service use increased by about 63% in just two years, from 2009-2011. The growth was most dramatic among the following activities: social networking, app usage, emailing and mobile browsing—and video and mobile wallet services like ticketing are expected to be the next services to experience significant uptake.

• Network issues are clearly driving churn. The primary reason consumers cited switching service providers was quality of service and dropped calls (35%). Coverage issues (34%) came a close second.

• Those consumers that are considered to be “early adopters” and are more explorative in their service use are more likely to churn compared to “laggards”. But the majority of consumers have found 3G to be “good enough”.

As Sean also noted, what’s important to remember is that consumers are different people doing different things and have different thresholds of what constitutes “pain”—and a good customer experience is often invisible. Service providers need to understand their mix of customers, determine which segmentation they are most concerned about losing and, most importantly, what they can do to avoid that (whether it be improving download speeds for mobile browsing or latency for mobile games, for instance).

InfoVista believes that a unified network, service and application performance management platform is critical to ensuring this end-user quality of experience. With a tool that enables real-time visibility, proactive monitoring and easy troubleshooting, service providers can provide the simplicity, immediacy, reliability and convenience that customers desire, and prevent dissatisfaction, churn and lost revenue.

We hope Management World Americas attendees enjoyed their time in Orlando and look forward to seeing you at the next industry event.

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?”

In the morning’s keynote session, Martin Creaner, president and CEO of TM Forum, was the first to share his views on what’s happening in the communications marketplace and where the industry is headed. It’s no secret that revenues are under more pressure than ever before, regulation is further squeezing service providers, and competition is emerging from all sides, he commented. But to avoid being relegated into ‘dumb pipes’, and even threatened by cyber security and fraud, service providers must look to address the following:

• Being more innovative with their businesses. They need to consider new marketing techniques, pricing models, etc. to offset slipping revenues. Service providers should also think about value-add opportunities and ways of generating complimentary additional revenue streams. Take cloud, for instance; with service quality visualization, service providers can remove barriers to adoption and profit from these new offerings.
• Reducing costs and increasing flexibility while mitigating risks, particularly with integration. To achieve this operational excellence and effectively differentiate, service providers require not just common, adaptable, automated OSS/BSS but network and application performance monitoring tools, with real-time, actionable data, that empowers all of its stakeholders. A solid back-office engine will accelerate the delivery of high-margin, high-value services and ensure that business goals are met.
• Maintaining and enriching the customer experience. Managing service quality is increasingly important for mobile operators. As they roll out 3G and 4G networks and try to accommodate demand for mobile broadband, it is critical for them to assure the smooth delivery and performance of Carrier Ethernet and mobile backhaul. A holistic and end-to-end view into key performance and quality indicators is really required for meeting customers’ expectations—and driving revenue growth and sustaining margins.

For those in attendance at Management World Americas, what did you think of yesterday’s keynote sessions? Are there any other ‘musts’ that you would add to Martin Creaner’s list? (We also hope that you won’t forget to stop by Forumville and learn about the Enhanced Cloud Service Management Catalyst.)