Tying the NOC to the Business (SLM)

Much has been written and said over the past ten years about leveraging data in a Network Operations Center (NOC) to help position service offerings in the marketplace.  Today, carriers sell network performance reports, commit to service level agreements tied to availability, and offer portals that will allow a customer to pull this data down whenever they want to.   While clearly these offerings have value, (they must, since customers are paying for them,) they still reflect a 20 year-old approach to infrastructure management— conducted one silo at a time.  None of the reports that I have seen offer any type of competitive advantage.  Nor do they reflect or enable the guiding business strategy of the vendor providing the “service” (more on this later).  Standard reports that leverage 10 to 20 year-old technology represent the first generation of OSS tools.  While reports are typically displayed in a single portal to give the appearance of being “integrated,” in most cases they are simply pulling stand-alone, silo reports into that portal to make access easier.  These are still legacy reports.

Literally every customer I have talked to is asking, ‘can you provide end-to-end views?’  We at Monolith call it Service Level Management (SLM), the right term if used in the context of end-to-end fault, availability, topology, and performance management.  (Say SLM to a BMC user and the term suddenly takes on a whole different meaning; for this blog I will discuss SLM as it relates to FCAPS/ETOM.)  To reiterate, literally every provider of a service needs to have an end-to-end view, for two reasons.  First, they need complete visibility for internal management reasons.  Second, they need to address the concerns of the marketplace.  End users, customers of managed services, IP services, wireless services, hosting services, outsourced services etc. are all being driven to show how they provide Service Level Management—SLM that is measurable, holistic, and verifiable.

What is really driving this?  It’s simple—the customer.  What has changed is the services offered, or rather the fact that the “IT or SP-centric” providers have matured.  Product or service offerings are now being sold that are made up of multiple technologies, (perhaps you have heard of converged services?)   Anyone reading this knows that the services are built upon different technologies to differentiate them in the marketplace.  Services today are built to support one of three go-to-market strategies: product leadership (think Apple), operational efficiency (think Wal-Mart) or customer intimacy (think Nordstrom).  [These three market disciplines were defined in a great book, The Discipline of Market Leaders by Michael Tracey and Fred Wiersema.  Any book that simplifies complex strategies is worth reading-- read this one.]

If one looks at the IT or network-centric marketplace, it is clear that these three strategies are used today, and it is also clear that the data residing in a NOC or in the FCAPS/ETOM model is data that can be used to package and position these products for potential and existing customers.  It is also clear that SLM needs an enabler, or a product set that can tie together the disparate data sources, matched to the SLM aspects of a new or existing service, again tied to the core strategy of the business—product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational effectiveness.   I have not used industry names to show examples of the three approaches, as I could create confusion by interpreting a firm’s offering or strategy incorrectly.  I am utterly confident, however, that there is a real need to show true, metric-based SLM leveraging real time data– fault, performance, availability– and virtually every customer I have talked to has struggled with how to deliver or meet these rapidly evolving requirements.

Monolith not only addresses these requirements, we allow reports to be customized down to the single customer via our multi-tenant capabilities.  We have a Web 2.0 architecture, which allows for the creation of custom dashboards—quickly.  We have an SLM metric manager which ties together different services to enable the end-to-end, metric-based SLM that the market is demanding.  Check out our SLM datasheet, or drop me a note if you want to discuss this.  A brief blog does not do this justice; more content and more examples will be posted in the future.
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NOC Monitoring, IT Management, OSS Tools, Availability, Performance, End-to-end management, Service Level Management, SLM, Converged Services,