By
Vikas Trehan
Today, service providers face increasing demands to provide Internet messaging, business applications, and information services to mobile users while maintaining end-to-end service management capabilities. The challenge becomes one of not only ensuring adequate service, but also ensuring a happy coexistence of all critical networked applications. In order to achieve the highest level of service performance, it has become increasingly imperative for service providers to change the way they manage their networks.
While tackling the complexity of delivering new and innovative services for ever-more-sophisticated wireless devices and delivering a high level of service performance, the quality of experience (QoE) for the customer is key. The importance of providing the proper attention to customer management and customer satisfaction is fast becoming recognized as mission-critical. A satisfied customer today is defined as one who has received a service experience that matches the expectations, guarantees, and assurance they were offered at point of sale or contract signing. The reality is that if customers become dissatisfied through poor service quality or broken business continuity (coupled with a competitive market) it will not take long before churn and lost revenue become a reality.
However, while QoE is an important measure of a service’s end-to-end performance from the user's perspective, other metrics are needed. There should be equal levels of emphasis put on infrastructure performance, as well as application performance. It is important for service providers to recognize the importance of moving toward a holistic