IBM Tivoli Ranked #1 in Service Assurance by Analyst

Tivoli Beat. A weekly IBM service management perspective.

In telecommunications, service assurance is the surest path to success

For communications service providers (CSPs), service assurance is far more than a buzzword. It's the fundamental strategy they use to attract and retain customers in one of the hottest and most competitive industries in the world. But it's also an area where many CSPs need help.

Sophisticated new mobile endpoints and ever-faster transmission protocols may support attractive new service possibilities... but is the CSP really prepared to deliver those services—in a way that will meet customer expectations for availability and performance? How can management of the overall infrastructure, both wired and wireless, be consolidated and simplified, given that that infrastructure gets significantly larger every year? When technical problems emerge, how fast can the CSP detect them, and resolve them, to minimize as much as possible the impact on customer satisfaction? Is it, in fact, possible to anticipate problems before they occur, and solve them proactively?

Questions like this have spurred CSP investment in service assurance solutions in recent years. And among industry leaders in this space, IBM stands out—the #1 player in the field as measured by market share. IBM Netcool solutions, in fact, have been deployed by every one of the top 20 CSPs worldwide. And over time, as IBM extends its competitive advantage through strategic acquisitions and technical innovations, the argument for IBM has only been getting stronger.

This year, IBM's leadership in service assurance was acknowledged by industry analyst Analysys Mason in a report (PDF, 189KB). Stating that IBM was the overall leader in the market, Analysys Mason went on to discuss IBM's proven success at:

  • Forming partnerships with all of the major infrastructure suppliers, such as Cisco and Alcatel
  • Integrating diverse technologies to form a cohesive overall service assurance solution
  • Helping CSPs consolidate and simplify overall management via the Netcool portfolio

In short, IBM offerings empower CSPs to better understand their complete infrastructures, detect and prioritize emerging technical issues and trends, proactively solve problems before they occur, and reduce operational risks and costs.

And added up, these capabilities deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction—the final metric of business success in the hyper-competitive telecommunications sector.

Unifying management of the technical infrastructure across multiple domains

To understand just how comprehensive IBM's vision and range of capabilities in this field are, consider the various domains that typically fall under the service assurance umbrella.

"IBM offerings empower CSPs to better understand their complete infrastructures, detect and prioritize emerging technical issues and trends, proactively solve problems before they occur, and reduce operational risks and costs."

Really optimizing service performance and reliability, over such a complex infrastructure, means that the CSP will typically need to pursue a number of different tasks simultaneously and in an orchestrated, unified way. For instance:

  • Discovery and data collection. Before you can maximize the business value generated by a given infrastructure, you must first understand everything that infrastructure consists of. Discovery capabilities ferret out the various elements, making it possible subsequently to aggregate data drawn from them, analyze it, and leverage it for many different purposes (like troubleshooting failed components, or anticipating their failure).
  • Performance management. How can you track, and drive up, the performance of different services in a business-prioritized fashion, such that customers' needs will best be met? Answering that question is what performance management solutions are all about.
  • Configuration management. In any complex technical infrastructure, asset configuration will change enormously over time—and not always for the better. Configuration management solutions help the organization more easily understand not just the current configuration status of different assets, but also how, and when, that status has changed at different points in time. They deliver a history of configuration changes that is often very helpful in isolating the root cause of unexpected developments.
  • Customer experience management. What kind of real-world experiences are end users getting from different services, accessed using different platforms, over different transmission protocols? Understanding and quantifying that is key to minimizing customer churn.
  • Fault and network management. This domain specifically addresses technical problem resolution. The faster and more accurately CSPs can isolate and fix service performance/availability issues, the better the business outcome they are likely to get.

What IBM's service assurance portfolio does is to integrate all of these domains (and others as well) in an intuitive and business-prioritized fashion. It provides CSPs with improved visibility, control, and automation via a central point of command—a straightforward portal of business service management and consolidated operations that unifies everything the CSP will have to do to assure services do, indeed, hit or exceed targets.

That means current and future services run faster, their uptime is higher, and customers either never notice technical glitches or those glitches are resolved as quickly as possible—a recipe for business success in telecommunications.

An integrated portfolio of best-in-class solutions

Curious just which IBM solutions make that happen? While the complete service assurance portfolio spans more than a dozen different offerings—which can be chosen and integrated based on customer needs and goals—some of the major elements are:

  • IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus. This solution aggregates data (such as network events) drawn from over a thousand different sources, helping to rapidly pinpoint network faults over even the most complex infrastructures.
  • IBM Tivoli Network Manager. Key discovery, topology creation, active monitoring, and service management capabilities are provided by this solution, which supports network types including DWDM, SONET, IP, Ethernet, and MPLS.
  • IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center. Performance management is the heart of this solution, a package that consists of IBM Tivoli Netcool Business Service Manager, IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager, and IBM Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Manager. Through seamless cross-solution integration, the offering thus delivers quantified insight into how well services are performing, the expected business impact of new performance shortfalls, and the way those shortfalls translate into a diminished customer experience—all of which is absolutely essential information in the pursuit of optimized service assurance.
  • IBM Tivoli Netcool/Impact. For more specific insight into the anticipated consequences of technical problems, this offering is very helpful. Because it correlates what's happening in the operations infrastructure with business priorities, quantified into key performance metrics, operations teams can more easily triage problems—solving the most critical first, for a superior outcome.
  • IBM Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager. Whether a CSP has fixed, mobile, or convergent networks—or all three, as is often the case—it can use this solution to assess network performance, then generate customized reports that reflect that performance. Operations teams can then optimize the infrastructure in the ways that will help the most going forward.

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