By Vikas Trehan

In these economic times, every business is facing the reality of lower budgets and the demand for greater cost efficiency. So it comes as no surprise that both tenets raise a variety of challenges for service providers. The need to generate more revenue opportunities from existing customers becomes paramount just as the enterprise is looking at their VPN and asking the question: Am I using my VPN efficiently? This creates the perfect storm—and the perfect time for service providers to ask their own question: What more can I offer?

A look at the changing marketplace from the perspective of the enterprise suggests potential new sources of business and incremental revenues for service providers. Enterprise and business clients rely on networks to do business, and their business service providers are key to their delivery chain.  A variety of trends are transforming the wide area network (WAN) as a business vehicle and pointing both large enterprises and their service providers into new directions. For example, globalization makes it possible for businesses to have offices,

employees, and partners everywhere in the world that need access to company resources and applications, which drives the need for hosted, shared collaborative applications to conduct routine business across the Internet—and they must perform at peak. Additionally, tools that enable remote business activities, like video conferencing and data streaming, are increasingly in demand and they, too, must perform reliably. Providing VPN connectivity is no longer enough to remain competitive. The focus is moving away from looking at the infrastructure toward fully managing the delivery of the service and applications.

This is where the opportunity arises for the service provider to provide advanced solutions
—offerings that extend their existing VPN offering to the global enterprise, with value

Creating A New Business Model

First, think about the way monitored solutions have typically been deployed, with traditional network performance management of the IP/MPLS and the WAN infrastructure, and then the separate domain of traditional enterprise service management. Many vendors in this second area specialize in monitoring Netflow performance across the local area network (LAN) and across the enterprise network itself, but they are not really concerned about what happens when a packet leaves and goes over to the service provider’s domain.

Today, however, these two domains merge so that managed VPN service providers are bringing these two worlds together. Those