The managed services space is one that continues to thrive, as enterprises focus more and more on their core competencies and less on managing different aspects of their IT infrastructure. Managed services ten years ago was fairly simple: it meant managing a router and a DSU, and providing basic performance reports — typically from either a switch on the network, from the DSU, or from a router performance tool. Today we now see all types of “managed services:” VOIP, hosted applications, MPLS, and more. The legacy, or shall I say managed ‘router-like’ services, where a vendor manages the router and the transport side, is still a very robust and mature business. Based on my experience while working at Voyence, I believe that Managed Service Providers are facing significant challenges, and the current legacy tool sets that they are using are adding cost and complexity. While the maturity of their business model dictates that all aspects of the service should be optimized from a delivery, cost, and management aspect, this is simply not the case.
Current challenges with legacy tool sets are common. It doesn’t matter which vendor one is using, it seems they all have some or all of the following issues:
Lack of ability to support multi-tenancy- this is causing significant cost pressures. One key issue is the cost of buying and deploying one server per customer. The hardware, energy, and maintenance costs are all escalating. While “virtualization” may seem to be a resolution, it is hard to gain efficiencies when your NMS tool is running at 95% capacity on each server. I know of several MSP’s that literally have hundreds of servers – one dedicated server per customer.
Certification- or the addition of new devices – tools that require custom syntax for rules. This means paying for training on a proprietary system, tools that rely on a closed “book” to determine root cause (which means a customer will pay thousands of dollars to get a device certified and wait in some cases months for the vendor to do it), or being told the device is not supported because it may be optical or “non-standard.” Maintaining these custom rules files over time is an IT nightmare, compounded by the threat of a discontinued software version and the mandatory upgrade required to stay current on maintenance. While a vendor may promise easy migration tools to assimilate these rules into the latest and greatest Generally Available release, what I have seen instead is many customers being forced to start from scratch and rebuild.
OSS integration- this issue is also significant, if a customer uses a proprietary “book” based tool set. Not only is the device certification issue a challenge, but integrating a closed system into their OSS infrastructure is generally a very difficult task. The lack of openness, and support for web-based standards all add up to long lead times for system changes and additional cost, resulting in providing a vanilla based service, while it is clear the new world requires an open and flexible approach.
New standard support- IPv6 is finally coming into maturity, globally, beyond government markets. SNMPv3 is also becoming a standard that needs to be supported. Legacy tools provide either limited or no support, and in several cases will require literally a fork lift upgrade to gain support for these new standards.
Support costs- virtually every MSP today has standalone software solutions for event, availability, performance, and presentation management. Each tool requires its own hardware (which may require multiple OS), admins, operators, reporting infrastructure, and costs to integrate the tools where necessary. As the customer base at an MSP grows, typically so does the cost for supporting the myriad of disparate toolsets. And let’s not forget the one-off scenario – some optical transport gear in the network which is handled separately via discrete monitoring of the EMS. Additionally, the value of maintenance paid for a tool acquired years ago declines rapidly, but the costs seem to increase every year. Where is that value when you are faced with the prospect of a complex upgrade, a need to buy more software, or get additional training to figure out the latest platform (and reintegrate)?
Anyone who is reading this and uses “legacy” vendor tools knows that there are other issues as well: lack of dashboards or “silo only” (fault or performance) dashboards, no true Service Level management, and high maintenance costs. Monolith can address the gaps shown above because Monolith was built with the following:
Multi-tenant- provided out of the box, with the required security, role-based access and more. The multi-tenanancy capability is the foundation, or keystone, which enables Monolith to provide customer-specific dashboards and SLM.
Device certification- Monolith provides a MIB-to-rules converter, which normally requires only minutes to create a new rule. Creating new rules can also be done on-the-fly, with an easy picklist, and many generic rules included to pull from – plus a customer-hosted site where additional rules are posted routinely. To optimize or customize the rule, all a customer needs is to have PERL language skills – which are common today AND preferred. Monolith’s approach is to build the relationships via our topology manager – no device certification is required, the customer can leverage our Hierarchical Correlation capability across the OSI stack.
OSS integration- Monolith is based on a Web 2.0 architecture. We support XML, SOAP – any metric type. Our internal database is MYSQL, our rules files are PERL based. Need I say more?
New standard support- Monolith TODAY fully supports both IPv4 and IPv6 as well as SNMPv3-TODAY.
Maintenance costs- first read about multi-tenant, device certification, OSS integration, and standards support, and hopefully Monolith’s inherent cost advantage is clear in each of those individual areas. Combine those benefits with the fact that we: 1) have a single code base, with no open source or acquired code; 2) provide FULL failover at the mediation, storage, and application layer; 3) ensure our code is modern, and scales significantly better than legacy tools; 4) have a modular product which can be licensed on a modular basis. If you want dashboards and or SLM, add the licenses whenever you would like; 5) our product installs faster than it takes to download over the Internet – as a rule of thumb, services are never over 20% of the license cost – we deploy turnkey in weeks, not months; 6) our maintenance costs are based on NET, not LIST, and we provide multiple, cost effective flavors to chose from to fit your budget and needs.
Bottom line: if you have any of the challenges listed above, you should call us. We have created a ROI question set designed to zero in on the true cost of ownership of current tools versus the Monolith approach. To be consistent we are modular — we are not advocating the rip and replacement of your current tools, we are advocating that we can, in a modular and phased fashion, leverage, enhance, or replace tools you have in place today.
Technorati Tags:
Monolith Software, MSP, Managed Service Provider, Multi-tenancy, certification, OSS Integration, IPv6, SNMPv3, MPLS, VOIP