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out exactly what's happening and find the source of the problem. Additionally, operators can prioritize applications to ensure a QoS that complies with enterprise guidelines, service level agreements (SLAs), and user expectations.
Keeping an Eye on the Enterprise
More and more, businesses of all types and sizes are expressing interest in real time, historic, and forecast reporting capabilities that best-of-breed performance management tools can provide. As the businesses consolidate data centers, they demand the same visibility at the application level. Mobile service providers achieve significant revenues from partnerships and wholesale subscriptions. Industry analysts report that mobile operators are seeing stellar growth in revenues coming from data services. For example, in 2007, Vodafone Group's revenues from data services (excluding messaging) grew by 51.6%, Rogers' (Canada) grew 49%, and Bell Canada's grew 45%. As such, it is critical to offer customer reporting to corporations that purchase enterprise data services (private APNs). They want to see the numbers that will back up a service provider's claims. Every operator has to be able to customize his or her reporting based on the service definition, which, in turn, dictates the collection and aggregation of data. To be effective, a performance management system needs the flexibility to accommodate this type of operator customization along with new and/or changing applications.
From Metrics to Management
Effectively maintaining the performance of these new converged services requires the development of a proactive network management strategy that supports minimizing service degradations rather than responding to them after the fact. When deciding on a more robust performance management system, here are some key requirements to ensure a proactive strategy:
- Tiered architecture and carrier-class scalability
Providing a focus on centralized inventory with automated discovery and data model provisioning, tiered architecture can offer automated and dynamic relationship maintenance for devices, services, KPIs, reports, and attributes. In addition, carrier-class scalability, which utilizes distributed collection, can result in a balanced, multi-tier processing architecture that is robust and highly available.
- Real-time analysis
A key attribute to successful network performance management is the analysis of data at the point of collection, including real-time performance metric computation and on-demand reporting. The comparison of real-time performance with historical baselines will help detect existing abnormal conditions. Preemptive, real-time alerting that identifies service level problems and impending performance degradations in advance of outages is also key.
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Establishing a strong track record for uptime and service quality is certainly the most effective way to generate customer loyalty and attract new users. No amount of clever advertising can replace a commitment to providing a high QoS. |
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- Open interoperability
The ability to have diverse systems working together through an industry standard database will allow for the successful bidirectional transfer of valuable business, performance, topology, and configuration data as well as the integration of existing EMS and OSS solutions. The performance management product should allow the integration with customer portals to provide a single view of the service including billing, trouble tickets, and performance SLAs.
- Object-based modeling
The aggregation of associated KPIs at multiple levels, from resource to service to customer, can help provide summarized information for various user communities inside an operator. Embedded workflows for specific tasks (service level management, capacity planning, problem resolution) while providing simplified customization (changes to pre-packaged analytics and the creation of new performance reports) are also important to focus on.
- Flexible and adaptive
The flexibility to rapidly utilize new and existing resources in multi-vendor, multi-technology environments is significant in the successful implementation of network performance management along with having customization of portal-based dashboards and reports. Another consideration in the ever-changing business world is the possibility of merger and acquisition activity. This can include expansion across local, state, or national borders, where governmental regulations and usage trends may vary. This type of change makes it imperative that a network performance solution is highly scalable to accommodate this kind of growth, as well as providing a broad enough platform to function seamlessly with a variety of vendor technologies and legacy systems.
Meeting the Challenge of Performance Management
In terms of cost and ROI, performance management solutions give operators the environment they need to work productively to ensure the optimal utilization of applications, as well as supporting a high
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