Manage wireless, wireline and converged networks in a unified manner
For communications service providers (CSPs) today, many challenges stand in the way of business success. Achieving a clear competitive distinction is necessary to attract new customers as well as minimize customer churn. Yet creating, delivering and managing new services to create such a distinction implies new costs—a serious problem in a questionable economy, when CSPs must also minimize operational overhead and maximize asset ROI.
One particular obstacle standing in the way of forward progress lies in the fact that for CSPs, wireline and wireless infrastructures have been deployed very differently, and are typically managed differently as a result. While this is a logical consequence of the historical way these organizations have grown, it nevertheless represents a fundamental inefficiency likely to generate added operational costs, not reduce costs. When wireless and wireline infrastructures are managed differently, using different often not integrated tools and processes, many complexities ensue; technical problems, for instance, won't be detected in a consistent manner across them, and when they are detected, a slower response to them will be the likely consequence. That can lead to a higher business impact of network and service impacting events, implying a diminished customer experience and lower satisfaction levels. So far from achieving a competitive distinction, and an expanding customer base, CSPs in this situation may find their customer base is shrinking.
A superior approach will come through integrated management across both wireline and wireless infrastructures, using consolidated solutions to achieve a uniform detection and resolution of technical problems when they occur—and a superior overall business outcome.
Just such consolidated management is made possible by IBM Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager (TNPM). This offering facilitates cross-infrastructure problem detection and resolution though a best-in-class feature set designed to help CSPs not only reduce the business impact of network performance issues, but also, in some cases, preclude it—solving technical problems before customers even have a chance to notice they exist. Thanks to network-wide analysis, infrastructure visualization and trend prediction, for example, it becomes possible for CSPs not only to optimize their domain specific infrastructures, but also prepare effectively for future needs. As next-generation network technologies are rolled out, that can happen more quickly, and with greater confidence, since the performance management infrastructure required to support them will already be in place.
Expandable tech pack library supports a large and growing array of technologies
The latest version of TNPM, in fact, contains innovations specifically designed to empower this sort of proactive support for both current and future network technologies.
This comes via its extensive library of off-the-shelf network interfaces, created with the assistance of leading network equipment vendors. These represent an answer to the question "How can CSPs proactively prepare their network management solutions for network technologies and services they haven't yet implemented?" Because the TNPM library supports a wide range of interface types, it empowers CSPs to both support current network technologies, and lay the foundation for future technologies, with exceptional speed and seamlessness.
As new technology packs become available, they can be added to the performance management systems on a modular basis that corresponds to organizational needs—essentially achieving a custom fit that is also tailored to the CSP's business goals. This design also translates into a faster rollout of the new services those offerings leverage. When new network technologies are required, thanks to the remarkable diversity of protocols, standards and technologies TNPM supports, those technologies can be deployed with confidence that their performance, too, can be managed using the same consolidated system.
Today, TNPM technology packs already address many standards of key significance to CSPs: GSM, GPRS, UMTS, HSPA/HSPA+, CDMA, EVDO, EDGE, MPLS, VoIP, IPTV and others. And as new fixed and mobile broadband services acquire market momentum, support for enabling technologies (e.g. WiMAX and LTE) can easily be added via the flexible TNPM library.
Today, TNPM technology packs already address many standards of key significance to CSPs: GSM, GPRS, UMTS, CDMA, EVDO, EDGE, MPLS, VoIP, IPTV and others. And as new services such as WIMAX acquire market momentum, support for them can easily be added via the flexible TNPM library.
Flexible reporting and distributed information
Technological support for various standards and protocols is, of course, only part of the overall performance management story. Also critical is the question of what to do with information that is drawn from supported solutions throughout the infrastructure—how should it be analyzed and depicted? How can it be tailored to reflect varying needs and organizational contexts? Different organizations and business goals will demand different answers to that question.
Here, too, TNPM has been proactively designed with flexibility in mind. Once TNPM technology packs are installed, and TNPM can poll different performance metrics across wireline and wireless infrastructures, the data it collects is analyzed. It can then be reflected in many different ways, including performance scorecards based on key performance indicators, reports, graphs and many other visualization models.
These can be customized to suit unique requirements—for instance, cross-technology and cross-vendor performance indicators can be created to show how different technologies, or vendors, compare to each other over time, possibly in order to suggest future purchasing. TNPM also includes flexible report definition tools capable of specifying and generating a wide variety of graphically-rich reports that clearly reflect status levels and other metrics to supplement the library of out-of-the-box reports. (Alternately, these reports can be exported in other formats, such as Excel spreadsheets, text files and others.)
In this way, TNPM can generate actionable business intelligence that empowers decision-making in any necessary context—from technical transmission reports for engineers, to benchmarked performance measured against target goals for executives.
Accelerated troubleshooting and reduced costs
The consolidated, expandable and user-configurable performance management delivered by TNPM thus translates very naturally into a wide array of compelling business benefits.
Thanks to its view of both the wireless and IP/wireline communications infrastructures into which network operations can drill down to any desired level of detail, problem detection and resolution are both accelerated—in many cases, happening in close to real time—to reduce as much as possible the costs of service degradation and the odds of ongoing outages.
Furthermore, the solution also supports automation in different ways, to spur an even more accelerated response when problems occur. System changes, such as resource adds and deletes, new customer /service mappings, resource grouping or other events can be automatically detected. And ongoing trend analysis based on user-defined thresholds and historical data can uncover problems, then notify operations staff about them via e-mail, SNMP traps or via automated routing to other solutions such as IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus for escalation and resolution.
Nor does the TNPM cost-reduction story end there. The solution's elegant technical design, including its application, database, loaders and other elements, has thoughtfully been developed to support scalability for any or all of those elements to minimize the costs of ownership over time by ensuring solution performance corresponds to changing requirements (maximizing utilization).
And because it is available for both Linux operating systems running on x86 platforms (such as IBM's own best-in-class System x series), or Solaris, Sun's operating system for both its SPARC-based hardware and x86 hardware, flexibility of deployment is also notable. Whatever a given CSP's requirements or infrastructural investments may be, TNPM can be deployed to maximize the return on those investments, rather than requiring new investments of its own—thus reducing costs in yet another manner.
Learn more
- Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager
- Flash demo of TNPM
- White paper on IBM leadership in service assurance for CSPs
(PDF, 86.62KB)
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