Where the Network Rubber Meets the Road (Mu Dynamics blog)
by Dave Kresse on 26 March 2008 - 05:27:52 PM
I admit it. I find
the Carrier
and MSO businesses and those who work in them to be fascinating.
Over the course of the last decade, these businesses have gone through a
radical change and greatly increased the scope of interaction with a vast
majority of the world’s population. Many
people today are highly dependent upon the varied VoIP
and real-time broadband services they receive from their provider.
What is great about the carriers and MSO’s we work with is
that many people in these organizations understand the transformation and the
responsibility that comes with delivering mission critical services. One of the things I like most about my job is
the interactions I get to have with our operator customer contacts whose
responsibility it is to move new equipment, new software, patches, etc. from
the test environment on to the live network.
They take their jobs quite seriously, realizing that if they release
something on to the network that causes service interruption or an outage,
people can be severely impacted. Quite
frankly, so can the carrier’s or MSO’s business. Interruptions and outages lead to unmet
customer SLA’s, but more important, they
violate a basic trust that exists between the carrier/MSO and the
customer. The customer is trusting that
their service will be there when they need it.
When it is not, a downtime breach has
happened that can directly lead to customer churn.
This “trust and availability” dynamic is really being put to
the test. The roll out of new services
like VoIP,
IPTV, and new IMS architectures has put major carriers and MSO’s around the
world into a situation where they no longer have the same level of confidence
in the reliability, availability, and security of the services they are rolling
out. The Telecom Industry
Association recently interviewed me about this topic in their monthly
newsletter. The inherent complexity of
these services is making it increasingly difficult for carriers and MSO’s to provide
service assurance, while at the same time the consumers of these services are
demanding them at ever increasing rates and depending on ever increasing
reliability, availability, and security of these services.
It is an exciting time to be on the road working with carriers and MSO’s
in addressing this timely challenge. Mu’s proactive
service assurance solution greatly increases our customer’s
confidence in the reliability, availability, and security of these
services, even while adhering to the tight deadlines demanded by the
business. It allows them to earn the
trust that their end users have placed in them.
Helping these leading network operator customers build and maintain their
customer’s trust is what motivates me to get out of bed every morning.
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