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Table of Contents:
 Budgets for Service Assurance Applications Increasing
Unleashing the Creativity of the Developer Community
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Budgets for Service Assurance Applications Increasing
By Ed Finegold
According to a survey conducted by TTI Team Telecom at the TeleManagement World event in Nice this past May, 63 percent of service providers see end-to-end, cross-domain management as their top priority in service management. The next most reported priority a full 17 percent of respondents stated that “linking customers to the service model” was their top priority. 24 percent and 21 percent of respondents stated that fault and performance management applications respectively are considered their most dominant OSS applications more than any other area. Respondents also stated that their top priorities for NGN OSS include “fault and performance service monitoring,” and “service provisioning or installation verification.” Finally, 60 percent of respondents stated that their budgets are approved or already in progress, suggesting a high level of confidence and knowledge regarding spending and priorities in the upcoming year.
Merging Fault and Performance
It’s important to consider that this survey was conducted by a supplier of service assurance applications, which suggests the numbers could be biased. If the numbers are even remotely accurate, they suggest that fault and performance management, once separate domains buried in the technical depths of the network, are finally merging and moving to the forefront to attend specifically to services and applications.
Service providers seeking anytime, anywhere offerings are increasingly concerned about the quality of the customer’s experience, which depends heavily on how services will perform in a borderless network environment. That environment, however, means that a logical, end-to-end network view that illuminates service performance is critical. Fault and performance management, in the past, were largely focused on a service provider’s physical networks and were treated as separate disciplines. For years the OSS community has called for integration of these areas, with a focus on how performance and fault problems affected specific circuits and thus services and customers. Though the technology to do this has been around for a while, and the philosophy has been accepted generally, the industry is just beginning to see these ideas come into production.
Assuring Real-time Applications
There is a growing recognition that very few communications ultimately will operate within just one provider’s network footprint. Network providers are dependent on each other for global connectivity and interconnection. The big issue is being able to manage services that are flowing over logical, interconnected networks, the physical components of which belong to distinct operators. Urgency, concern or even fear over this issue is what is finally driving the call for end-to-end service assurance applications that support SLAs and can tie specific network events to affected applications and customers. The next big question, in an environment where there will be significantly more on-demand transactional traffic and more machines talking to machines without human initiated communication, is whether the service assurance suppliers are up to the challenge of handling massive volumes of transactions and traffic in real time to support proactive or real-time customer support.
Want to learn more? Attend TeleStrategies' Customer Experience Management '07 on November 13 and 14, 2007 in Orlando, Florida. http://www.telestrategies.com/CEM/
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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