Historically, service assurance has not delivered much value to the telecom business because it’s typically a high-cost, high-maintenance system that is slow to respond to change.
Yet in today’s fast-paced and fiercely competitive telecom world, every OSS/BSS system – service assurance included – should earn its keep and become a true strategic platform.
And by strategic, I mean a platform that benefits the business by either: 1) raising customer satisfaction to better retain them and attract new customers; or 2) lowering operational costs to improve the bottom line.
And operators who have invested in a modern, forward-looking service assurance platform are proving it truly can deliver a competitive advantage to the business.
But to accomplish that, those systems had to overcome the basic design flaws that made service assurance solutions so costly and only marginally effective.
Why Traditional Service Assurance Systems Don’t Deliver the Value
If I were to pick the major problems with older service assurance systems, the top three would be these: high installation costs; inability to visualize service health and performance; and their failure to deliver a robust proactive assurance program. Let’s briefly discuss each of these…
1. High installation costs due to heavy customization
The first drag on the business is that older service assurance solutions impose is their high cost of installation and maintenance. And they are high cost because these solutions are not really an out-of-the-box solution, but a framework for heavily customizing each solution to fit each service provider’s unique network.
Now while a certain amount of configuration is necessary, does heavy customization really make sense when 99 percent of the devices and technologies being integrated from one carrier to the next are exactly the same?
No, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s a great way for vendors to fund professional services work. In fact, as new technologies, devices, and vendors are added, costly, and time-consuming professional services work is needed to keep the solution up to date.
2. Inability to visualize service health and performance crucial to timely troubleshooting of a customer’s network issues
If the whole purpose of service assurance is to quickly resolve a customer’s network problems and prevent future ones, then being able to visualize the health of end-to-end and hierarchical services is absolutely essential.
Networks are so inter-woven today that without a solid way of visualizing these multi-layered, multi-vendor networks, it takes way too long to isolate root causes and quickly resolve the issues that affect customers.
Here too, the heavy customization required in older service assurance architectures gets in the way. The old approach makes the whole environment slow to upgrade and less adaptable to the constant change that occurs in today’s dynamic networks.
Accuracy suffers, too, because each sub-network operates in its own technology plane making it hard to pull together a unified network.
3. Service assurance ends up being totally reactive, not proactive.
Proactive service assurance – pre-empting potential network service outages before they occur – is where a good service assurance system really earns its keep.
And the secret to a proactive solution is the ability to define rules that correlate alarms and do root cause analysis without any programming and that is not dependent on the network technology or topology.
Unfortunately when your assurance system is a mass of custom code developed over years and years, it discourages you from maintaining the kind of advanced rules knowledgebase that’s key to a solid proactive program. So traditional systems find themselves constantly reacting to problems, not anticipating them, and that can severely hurt customer retention.
Turning Service Assurance into a Strategic Platform
OK, so what can be done to turn a costly and ineffective service assurance solution into one that truly supports the business? Here are the qualities I believe make the difference:
1. True software, not just a framework, that’s fast to install and easy to maintain
To save costs, the service assurance system needs to work out-of-the-box, not merely a framework for customization. And the proof that it is true software is how long it takes to install and customize. Out-of-the-box software can be deployed and configure in a matter of days and weeks as opposed to months and years.
2. The service assurance vendor manages device communication
The point of buying software is to not have to reinvent the wheel. A complete service assurance solution should come with device libraries that keep up with the latest versions and capabilities of the devices. With a device library, users no longer need to do programming. Adding a new device and configuration can be done in a matter of minutes, and that’s a big productivity boost for network operations.
3. Technology-independent monitoring enables true topology visibility
Good service assurance software solve the multi-technology challenge of today’s networks by delivering an abstraction layer above whatever technology is being monitored: SONET, Ethernet, DWDM, MPLS, wireless, you name it.
This abstraction layer gets rid of the manual programming that prevents you from keeping service topology up-to-date so you can easily visualize the health of these complex multi-dimensional networks.
With accurate, up-to-date network and service maps, users gain true service visibility and can quickly identify the root-cause of problems that impact customers.
4. Proactive service assurance becomes a reality
Having a simpler plug-and-play solution for managing network fault and performance enables operations staff who are non-programmers to easily configure the system to create dashboards, reports, workflows, thresholds, and correlation rules.
In this way, you can rise above the fire-fighting and reactive style of service assurance and achieve the kind of proactive service assurance that dramatically reduces the customer-impacting events that cause customers to walk to a competitor.
Yes, given its past track record, turning service assurance into a strategic platform certainly sounds hard to achieve. But savvy operators have successfully made the leap to a modern service assurance platform, one that transforms a high maintenance function into a platform that really earns its keep by taming costs and delighting customers with a better network experience.
