By: Martin Saunders

In the evolving landscape of Communication Service Providers (CSPs), the pressure to deliver exceptional services alongside ever increasing sales targets has never been greater. The competitive advantage of merely offering the latest technology has diminished. Enterprise customers are far less concerned about whether their service is underpinned by a legacy MPLS network or the latest SD-WAN, so long as it delivers on its promises. Today’s differentiators now lie in delivering compelling commercials and the best service wrap.

At the same time, SD-WAN platforms such as Cisco Meraki continue to be popular with enterprise IT departments looking to gain greater control of their own networks. Having invested in SD-WAN technology, enterprises now have the cloud controllers for remote configuration and management; however, they also lack any real-time visibility, monitoring, alerting, and historical trend reporting. This presents a significant pain point.

For CSP sales teams, understanding and addressing these gaps is the key to delivering a differentiated pitch to prospects that keeps their attention and turns them into customers. CSPs are therefore having to support the SD-WAN technology as well as deliver a higher level of understanding into how all vital services are performing across often complex and multilayered networks.

The Role of Observability

Leading CSPs are now adopting service observability platforms internally to enhance their support and account management capabilities, but it also presents an opportunity for sales teams to achieve new wins by offering observability as an add-on, giving them an opportunity to get efficiency wins and make them more involved in their customers’ overall service.

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Service observability is also becoming a major differentiator and, depending on the CSP’s approach, can be a value booster, bringing in MRR and increasing the profit margin of the service.

The latest cloud-based service observability platforms give CSPs the ability to add a powerful layer of monitoring and alerting capabilities across a network. In addition, they are quick to implement, scalable, easy to deploy, and since there is no on-premises equipment, are low maintenance for CSPs.

With greater observability, sales and customer support teams can shift their focus from merely ensuring service uptime to enhancing strategic customer accounts with improved information delivery and comprehensive service wraps. Customers value having robust real-time insights and historical reporting to ensure their networks are performing optimally and to provide evidence of service value to key stakeholders.

Observability Solutions Helps Smaller Customers to Help Themselves

A pertinent example is Countrywide Healthcare, a 27-year-old supplier of medical equipment to the care sector. The company faced critical network performance challenges in a new warehouse equipped with a Cisco Meraki SD-WAN network. The