Moving from service assurance to operational guidance

Service assurance maintains connectivity, but it doesn’t help executives make business decisions or weigh the merits of a CEM strategy. With NetScout’s nGenius solution CSPs can apply the same data used for service assurance and turn it into business metrics. For instance, network monitoring might reveal five applications or elements that are consuming the most network resources, representing excellent opportunities for premium-service creation or potential partnerships. As you can see in figure 2, the combination of NetScout’s capabilities results in actionable intelligence for service providers and an improved experience for subscribers.

There are certainly other vendors in the market, but NetScout’s value proposition is that it gives service providers a single unified view into their network encompassing the network, services, enablers and users, one that allows proactive management, performance management and business intelligence, all with the same platform. It also offers the ability to scale to support very large nationwide networks, which is vital to the network needs of CSPs. (It’s worth noting that Gartner identifies scalability as a crucial feature of both business intelligence and data analytics solutions in a recent report.)

Getting ahead

Preventative CEM is possible in telecom. But to solve problems before they occur, CSPs need a deep level of real-time, granular visibility into, and control over, their progressively complex networks. In order to model a network from the customer’s perspective, this visibility needs to extend through both the data and control planes and be able to monitor applications and users. Armed with these capabilities, CSPs can prevent painful outages.

Meanwhile, leveraging a service assurance solution for business decisions is a smart way to extract even greater value from network data, and can inform operational choices and further CEM strategies. The time to discuss lifeboats is before the ship sets sail, and with the right solutions in place CSPs can transition their CEM strategies from reactive to proactive.