Making the Most of Service Assurance Investments

Reflecting is not usually the way my day begins, unless I’m camping and waiting for coffee to boil. I usually arrive at the office to a queue of e-mails and tasks, and usually the rest is a blur. But it was a different kind of start Tuesday morning at the VON Conference & Expo in Miami: Our panel of three talented, industry thought leaders had plenty of insight on tap. They squared up the state of affairs in Service Assurance (SA), and shared hard-won experience that make the most of substantial investments into service management, performance monitoring and back-office systems of all kinds. By “substantial”, we’re talking millions, an ongoing expense providers pour into their platforms: sometimes just to keep their heads above water, but increasingly to gain a strategic advantage over less organized operators.

So how does an operator monetize and maximize their investments in SA? That’s what we set out to explore, and let me tell you, an hour is scant time for such a subject. We covered the highlights and then some in double time, here is the wrap-up.

Making Money

Generating revenue is always a popular subject, and Matt Herdlein, executive director of Telcordia’s service management portfolio, pointed out that monitoring quality of service (QoS) can lead to new value-added services. By trending performance over a period of time, Herdlein explained, providers gain confidence in their ability to deliver premium, SLA-grade services. Repeatable QoS data seems to be what some providers need to take the leap into a premium services portfolio. Such services are known to deliver 25 to 60 percent more profit to a provider, depending on the level of commitment: Ultra-low latency, jitter and high availability command a higher price than simple packet-loss and basic uptime assurances. Grant Kirkwood, founder and CTO at Mzima, echoed this observation, adding that not only does SA let a provider discover their strengths and develop new products, trending data acts as a powerful track record that shows new customers you’ve got what it takes when courting their business.

Information Is Everything

Having data is good, but real-time reporting and finding the needle in the data haystack is a key to SA delivering on its potential. Rick Schmaltz, VP Business Development at CA, highlighted a subscription Web support and data-mining service offered by Verizon Business that lets customers drill down into their network and application transmission data to perform ad-hoc reporting. Since its introduction, significant uptake shows that enterprise IT departments are willing to pay extra for more information, using insight gained to optimize traffic flow, plan network and data center upgrades, and evaluate and maintain per-application QoS.

Having a real-time customer portal is a differentiator, but proceed with caution, says Kirkwood, since giving customers access to too much data can backfire. He points out that each customer has their own view of what matters, so portals should reflect their needs. So while you would report per-second latency performance to a financial firm, it may not make sense to highlight jitter performance as you would to a video-oriented customer. Even data that shows you’re doing a great job might cause issues. For example, if your SA portal shows rapid switchover to a protected route, a provider would be proud: It’s great to show your network stays up even with a fiber cut. But to some customers, just knowing that protection was required is unsettling, and can even be misinterpreted as a service outage – even if not a single packet was lost.