IBM solutions propel service management for Communication Service Providers

Seizing new opportunities and solving old problems

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Few industries are as challenging at the present time as the telecommunications market. Communications service providers (CSPs) must minimize customer churn and operational overhead, distinguishing themselves in a demanding market full of competitors by enhancing current service levels as much as possible, yet also delivering new services swiftly and flexibly in order to align with changing needs and conditions.

Needless to say, many complexities commonly combine to make that double goal difficult to achieve.

Business and technological agility—the general process of responding rapidly to dynamic market conditions and customer interests—can be hard to improve when legacy infrastructures are in place, characterized by older solutions not ideally designed for flexibility and scalability. New services such as VoIP, IPTV and mobile gaming may be of interest to the customer base: how quickly, securely and cost-effectively can they be rolled out? Furthermore, as more transactions occur throughout the CSP’s infrastructure, security becomes more critical, and CSPs must strive to implement proactive, holistic security as a key part of service management. As those infrastructures are leveraged to support rapidly-expanding data volumes, optimized data management, too, becomes a new dimension of complexity to address. Finally, customer satisfaction must be tracked as comprehensively and accurately as possible, to ensure that technical problems are resolved quickly and that end-user quality expectations are met—decreasing the odds that the customer will leave for a more nimble competitor.

IBM delivers a powerful new package of solutions for communications service providers

“With the help of IBM’s service management packages, organizations can make their infrastructures more dynamic—solving current problems within their industries, but also making the most of new, industry-specific opportunities that may serve as a silver lining to today’s cloudy market.” For CSPs, the new IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package will come as excellent news.

This package is one of seven announced in February at Pulse—the premiere service management event of the year—and like the other six, is specifically designed to help organizations optimize service management in an industry-specific manner though an integrated, modular combination of best-in-class offerings. With the help of IBM’s service management packages, organizations can make their infrastructures more dynamic—solving current problems within their industries, but also making the most of new, industry-specific opportunities that may serve as a silver lining to today’s cloudy market.

IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers, for instance, focuses on five key focus areas of direct relevance in the communications service sector: service assurance, asset management, configuration management, management and data management.

All five are critical elements of superior service management for CSPs; all five also involve their own subtleties and challenges to consider, weigh and prioritize in the pursuit of an ideal outcome. By helping CSPs optimize in any or all of these areas via a tailored total solution, as suggested by their unique organizational needs, goals and contexts, the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package empowers CSPs to innovate more quickly, and also reduce the costs of that innovation—rendering them substantially better able to compete.

Service Assurance

IBM is the leader in Service Assurance, as witnessed by the overwhelming success of the IBM Tivoli Netcool family of solutions. With over 1,000 CSPs as clients, including all of the top twenty, Tivoli Netcool-empowered customers are the direct beneficiaries of IBM’s commitment to driving up service levels—and with them, customer satisfaction.

How do these ideals play out in real terms? Every technical and logical layer of the CSP infrastructure—devices, networks or services—should be optimized to improve the customer experience—mitigating or even precluding a negative impact on that experience through extraordinarily swift problem detection and resolution. And it would be even better if, in the process of enhancing service assurance along these lines, operational costs and infrastructural complexity might be reduced simultaneously.

Just such an outcome becomes possible with the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package, which incorporates many carrier-grade, scalable solutions proven to deliver those outcomes. Fault and event management, performance management, systems management, network discovery, service quality management, service transaction monitoring and service request management offerings from IBM all integrate cleanly and cost-efficiently to assure that services meet both business goals and customer expectations.

Asset management

Capitalizing on market opportunities in communications service means delivering new services through an optimized infrastructure. This, in turn, requires best-in-class asset management. Many aspects must be weighed and considered:

Planning, procurement and field engineering need to work in harmony so that network and IT assets are procured economically, deployed cost effectively and optimally maintained.
Inventory Management systems need an up-to-date and precise view of asset deployments to support accurate service provisioning.
Financial and risk management teams need to be able to track high value assets to understand return on investment and drive financial reporting and regulatory compliance.

IBM asset management solutions included in the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package comprise a logical response to these and many related complexities—from the data center to the tower to the last mile and every point in between.

By linking existing procurement, financial, inventory and workflow systems, for example, this package provides a shared view of assets—eliminating duplication, improving accuracy and enabling process optimization. For example:

Stock levels and demand forecasts can be combined for just-in-time procurement, delaying or reducing network and IT capital expenditure.
Field engineering can optimize installation processes, automate stock level tracking and integrate seamlessly with equipment vendor return and repair processes.
Maintenance and incident management can be optimally coordinated, reducing truck rolls and personnel costs and minimizing the impact of maintenance activities on service quality.

The IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package also integrates effectively with legacy technologies—even assets not normally part of the IP infrastructure (thanks to support for RFID in the IBM Maximo family of asset management solutions). CSPs can also leverage IBM asset management beyond the service delivery chain. This compelling possibility comes thanks to a specific configuration option, targeted at managed services, that includes multi-customer support, customer-specific response plans and an integrated billing capability.

In this way, the package helps CSPs unify and optimally leverage all asset information—essentially, transforming it into actionable business intelligence to be passed on to other components of the package such as change and configuration management to spur overall service management goals and create more business value.

Configuration management

Achieving competitive distinction means delivering innovative new services competitors don’t offer. Yet supporting new service delivery of this type requires optimal configuration management, which is far from simple—particularly for CSPs and their typically complex, distributed infrastructures.

Among other configuration management challenges, for instance, CSPs must find uniform ways to identify resources that span different groups (such as field engineering and operations), sharing key information across groups to optimally achieve bigger-picture business goals such as cost reduction and minimized time-to-solution, should a problem occur.

Here, the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package can play a central role by centralizing information in a de facto sense—that is, federating and reconciling data sources without actually forcing the expense of a truly centralized data repository.

CSPs can thus continue to leverage their current data pools, yet achieve the business benefits that might have come from true centralization, such as more flexible management for both planned and unplanned outages, cross-domain business processes and improved responsiveness to technical problems through automated root-cause analysis and problem escalation. What’s more, configuration management data will also suggest and inform improvements in other areas of service management through shared network and service models across components.

Security management

CSP infrastructures are in a state of convergence as more and more services are delivered over IP. With that convergence, however, comes a new focus on security. When services leverage a common delivery platform, that platform must be as secure as possible—shielded not just from today’s threats, but from tomorrow’s, and not just in certain elements of the infrastructure, but in all.

Such proactive, end-to-end security is no simple feat, however. At many CSPs, where services were originally deployed on separate infrastructures, security remains fragmented. And customers see a double impact—not only are their transactions more at risk as a result, but also their convenience in using new services can be diminished, because their preferences and identities may not be shared across services.

Included in the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package are security solutions specifically intended to resolve these and other daunting problems faced by CSPs today. Federated access and identity management solutions, for instance, can link different pools of customer identity, automatically mapping customers from one pool to another and thus improving their convenience in using services while also improving the security they receive. In the same way, CSPs can also leverage these solutions to deliver white-label partner services to their customers—increasing revenue while maintaining target security levels.

Finally, security management can be deployed on a standalone basis, in cases where CSPs wish to deploy n-tier architectures to improve scalability. It can also be integrated with event management for an elegant, streamlined total outcome in which a single center addresses both network operations and security operations.

Data management

Among the many new services CSPs now offer in the attempt to engage and retain customers, many involve content—both content delivered from CSPs to users, and content created by users and supported via the CSP infrastructure. Both cases lead to an explosion in data volumes for the CSP, and optimizing overall service management will certainly mean optimizing data management as a key element of the strategy.

Consider the case of a CSP offering storage to end users for such hot content categories as blogs, e-mail and family pictures and movies. Ensuring customer satisfaction for such services requires that the CSP ensure that the content is continually available. It also implies a serious shift in how CSPs consider data management, incorporating elements such as fast and flexible backup and archiving and addressing topics such as regulatory compliance, forensics and the possibility of fraud.

Fortunately, the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package is empowered by many leading technologies and services in the data management space—partly the outcome of more than twenty different acquisitions IBM has made since 2005. Among other business and technological benefits that stem from it, CSPs can expect to achieve superior data protection and retention, reduced operational costs, increased availability, enhanced regulation compliance—even, should the organization require it, a complete disaster recovery strategy supported by a flexible hierarchy of online and offline storage.

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