Published on 14-Sep-2006
Validated on 02 Jul 2009
"We wanted to establish which device was being over-used, under-used or redundant, which customer or service was impacted by each network element and where in the network each element was located." - Christian Kampfer, Head of Network Operations, Cablecom
Customer:
Cablecom
Industry:
Telecommunications
Deployment country:
Switzerland
Solution:
Optimizing IT
Overview
Cablecom is acknowledged as the one of the top three cable operators in Europe. And the company is setting new standards in high-speed broadband access, Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony services and digital TV. However, the biggest opportunity for Cablecom lies in delivering triple-play services (multiple services over its IP backbone).
Business need:
Deliver multiple value-added services over existing Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure while simultaneously managing the complexity of the infrastructure
Solution:
Network management platform with real-time service visibility, troubleshooting, consolidated operations management and quality-assurance capabilities
Benefits:
Helps reduce time to correlate a network alarm to the service impacted from 50 minutes to just 10 seconds; enables staff to resolve service-affecting alarms before they impact customers; reduces number of event alarms; optimizes resources for efficient headcount
Case Study
“The integration between our inventory and service assurance systems has provided significant operational and capital expenditure savings. Cablecom now wastes less time on reworking orders and depends less on manual data entry.”
–Christian Kampfer
“With Tivoli Netcool software and trouble-ticketing integration, we aim to automatically correlate the network alarm to the service impacted within just 10 seconds. This enables Cablecom to meet service guarantees and enhance its customer care and service.”
–Christian Kampfer
| Why Become an On Demand Business? Improving quality assurance and service management would help facilitate the ability to deliver multiple services, including broadcast, telecom, hosting, gaming and broadband services, over IP backbone |
Cablecom, a 100 percent subsidiary of Liberty Global Inc. since October 2005, is the largest cable television company in Switzerland, serving 1.8 million homes. Headquartered in Zürich, Cablecom employs some 1,400 people and offers digital telephony, analog and digital television, and radio. The company also provides high-speed broadband Internet services and business applications to both the consumer and corporate markets over a 3,500 kilometer, high-capacity, fully redundant fiber backbone. Cablecom’s local loop network consists of 15,000 kilometers of coaxial cable, most of it capable of transmitting bidirectional data.
Cablecom is acknowledged as one of the top three cable operators in Europe. And the company is setting new standards in high-speed broadband access, Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony services and digital TV. However, the biggest opportunity for Cablecom lies in delivering triple-play services (multiple services over its IP backbone). The company’s triple-play offering combines high-speed Internet, digital telephony and VoIP, digital television, and pay-per-view or digital cinema over an IP network.
Cablecom also sees an opportunity to provide tailored communications services to its business customers and wholesale telephony services to its partners. The consumer triple-play, corporate communications and wholesale markets demand a high level of service quality, reliability and value. As a result, Cablecom wanted to deploy and deliver these new services while protecting its reputation as one of the best cable operators in Europe.
Advanced, end-to-end service quality management
Cablecom first selected IBM Tivoli® Netcool® software (formerly Micromuse Netcool) in 2002 to centralize and consolidate its operations and standardize alarm management. The company subsequently extended the Tivoli Netcool installation to deliver integrated inventory and resource management through sophisticated auto discovery, fault detection and root-cause analysis, advanced service management and service- visibility capabilities. The Tivoli Netcool implementation, designed and delivered by systems integrator OpenAdvice, addresses every aspect of Cablecom’s operational environment and service delivery, ranging from which network problem could impact a customer, to where in the network the problem is and which service is affected.
Consolidated operations, efficient headcount
The first step in Cablecom’s quest for advanced, end-to-end operations management was the centralization of the company’s diverse element management systems, technologies and operational environments. Some 35 different technologies were integrated into Tivoli Netcool software, including:
- Networks based on synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH), dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), IP and data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS).
- Devices from Cisco, Alcatel and Siemens.
- Operating systems, such as Solaris and Linux®.
OpenAdvice worked with Cablecom to integrate specialist technology for cable TV and third-party devices and applications that support the various broadcast, telephony and Internet services it offers. Each separate network device, component and standard required dedicated element management systems, which together were generating a huge volume of network event messages for Cablecom’s operation teams. The standardization of these various devices, systems and technologies now enabled the operations teams to gain an end-to-end, single view of Cablecom’s service delivery infrastructure. This single operational view enabled Cablecom’s operations teams to quickly identify and prioritize network problems, and to manage more services—such as triple-play services—without a corresponding rise in headcount. This enabled the company to bring new services to market quickly and competitively.
Tivoli Netcool software provides a true picture of the operational environment, even managing non-IP and essential external systems, such as the air-conditioning units at Cablecom’s data centers. This capability helps the operational teams identify whether a server is down due to a fault with the device or because it has overheated due to a fault with the air conditioning system.
Advanced service correlation
Capacity planning and utilization is essential to the efficient delivery of triple-play and corporate telephony services. Cablecom installed Tivoli Netcool solutions to:
- Automatically discover its Layer 1, 2 and 3 networks.
- Gather topology data to deliver a complete picture of devices and connectivity across Cablecom’s IP networks.
- Assure the data quality.
“We wanted to establish which device was being over-used, under-used or redundant, which customer or service was impacted by each network element, and where in the network each element was located,” says Christian Kampfer, head of Network Operations at Cablecom. “The Netcool team worked together with OpenAdvice and Cramer to deliver an integration between our inventory and service assurance solutions that could provide an accurate picture of our assets to help network planning, order management, reconciliation, service activation and reporting.
“The integration between our inventory and service assurance systems has provided significant operational and capital expenditure savings,” continues Kampfer. “Cablecom now wastes less time on reworking orders and depends less on manual data entry. We also benefited from faster data migration and reduced integration time-scales. Ultimately, as the size and complexity of Cablecom’s infrastructure grows, we have been able to manage our maintenance costs and, more importantly, acquire knowledge and information on our customers, services and infrastructure.”
In addition to accurate discovery of the IP infrastructure, the Tivoli Netcool solution delivered a reduction of event alarms. Tivoli Netcool quickly analyzes events to identify the root cause of network problems, significantly improving Cablecom’s time to resolution.
Customer-centered services
With 364,000 high-speed Internet customers, 207,000 digital telephony customers, 112,000 digital TV customers and some 1.41 million analog TV customers, Cablecom understands the value of retaining and respecting its customer base.1 The company wanted a service-centric view of its network infrastructure, and OpenAdvice delivered an integration between its trouble-ticketing system and the Tivoli Netcool software.
“The integration of trouble tickets with network alarms means that we can proactively prioritize and resolve service-affecting alarms before they impact the customer,” says Kampfer. “This is especially important for our corporate customers, as they depend on the services they receive from us for their day-to-day business activities. We estimated that it previously took 20 minutes for a corporate customer to complain about a service outage, and it took our operators 30 minutes to manually correlate a network alarm to the service it affects. With the Tivoli Netcool software and trouble-ticketing integration, we aim to automatically correlate the network alarm to the service impacted within just 10 seconds, enabling Cablecom to meet service guarantees and enhance its customer care and service.”
The end-to-end Tivoli Netcool service assurance solution, together with the integrations to Cramer ResourceManager and the company’s trouble-ticketing application, delivers a single, effective management interface to Cablecom’s operations and management teams. Tivoli Netcool software provides the backbone of Cablecom’s service-oriented operations management, and delivers real-time business intelligence that supports existing and new services and products.
On Demand Business Benefits
- End-to-end view of service delivery infrastructure enables IT operations to manage more services without a corresponding rise in headcount
- Integration of inventory and service assurance solutions reduces manual entry and reworking of orders for significant operational and capital expenditure savings
- Integration of trouble tickets with network alarms provides service-centric view of infrastructure, helping staff resolve problems before customers are impacted
Key Components
Software
- IBM Tivoli Netcool
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit our Web site at:
ibm.com/tivoli
For more information about Cablecom, visit:
www.cablecom.ch
1 As of March 31, 2006.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Netcool for Asset Management
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2006 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 09-06 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, On Demand Business, the On Demand Business logo, Netcool and Tivoli are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results.
