Board of Director's Blog

Is your IP migration with or without migration?

2008-11-13T15:45:00Z

Johanne Mayer
Director, Alcatel-Lucent
Special responsibility for representing Suppliers

While most service providers undergoing an IP transformation have a migration strategy, there are network operators who are taking a quantum leap and transforming WITHOUT doing a migration! Bold move? Absolutely! Will it cost them less? Can they do this without causing negative customer churn? The answers often depend on how the transformation is planned and managed.

If we look at all the money being spent in testing the multitude of possible combinations in migrating the traditional services such as Frame and ATM to Ethernet and IP with or without interworking functions in between, it's clear that migration costs are significant and not without risk. So should you emulate an existing service or develop an advanced service as a replacement? Should you "push" (i.e. force) or "pull" (i.e. via marketing or incentives) your customers across? Experience shows that it's key to assess a business case that considers the total cost comparisons, critical assumptions, as well as a market analysis of the assumptions and potential churn impacts.

Do you have an opinion? Drop me a line to discuss...

Johanne joined Alcatel-Lucent in 1994 through the Newbridge acquisition and Lucent merger. Currently, Johanne is director communication for the global Systems and Applications Integration services group. Johanne is the spokesperson for OSS, Applications and network management products and solutions with industry analysts and the press as well as an officer of the TM Forum. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Management World, BBWF, 3GSM, IQPC and TeleStrategies and represents Alcatel-Lucent at various global forums. During her 20 years in the industry, she has worked as a support engineer, a product manager and marketing director, always focused on the Carrier operations.

A graduate of the University of Ottawa, Johanne holds two Bachelor of Science degrees: an honours degree in Mathematics with Co-op, and a second degree in Computer Science. She also holds a patent on Frame Relay Congestion Management.

“Customer-Eye” View of Services Required for Mobile Operators

2008-08-04T11:16:00Z

Michele Campriani
Manager, Protocol Products Group
Sunrise Telecom

Mobile Operators are in a time of incredible flux and transition in both the technical and business aspects of their operations. In the past, a majority of service revenue was derived from voice services, with a small amount of revenue generated from low-bandwidth data services such as phone-based Internet browsing. However, due to the development of interactive mobile applications, enhancements in access network technologies such as 3.5/3.75G and overall increased customer expectations, the demand for mobile data services has skyrocketed. Most industry insiders agree... it will be cost-effective, interactive services such as video calling, mobile gaming, presence and pod/iPhone-casting that will set operators apart in the coming years.

Introducing these services is no easy task, however, as the multi-service networks required to deliver them are much more complicated than legacy voice-only networks. This new world of converged mobile networks and mobile data services has greatly expanded the role of network troubleshooting and monitoring tools. In essence, they have transitioned from being a ‘necessary evil' to maintain the network, to a key business enabler, allowing operators to expand their service portfolios and at the same time reduce operating expenses.

As an example, there are new OSS/troubleshooting tools on the market that gives an operator visibility into services from a customer-centric view. While this might sound 'fluffy', it is actually a pretty neat thing. A few of these tools even have the ability to correlate data collected from the network, from services, from users, and even from devices themselves. This allows operators to better manage the actual services, and also gives new visibility into how the users are using/not using/abusing the services as well. Thus what was once just a monitoring and troubleshooting tool has now become a great source of intelligence for the marketing and strategy departments.

There are still many challenges to be overcome in the fight for dominance in the mobile data services arena, but I truly believe that the tools and resources available are as good as they have ever been, and will continue to make their way into the core strategic thought process of the operator.

Michele Campriani is currently the General Manager of the Protocol Products Group in Sunrise Telecom. Previously, he was Director of OSS solutions for HP’s Communication Media and Entertainment Business Unit.In this role, he was responsible for the OSS product and solution portfolio and for the HP Consulting OSS practice on a worldwide basis. He drove the growth and profitability of the business through the success of a set of OSS solutions that have been delivered to several Service Providers around the world.

From 1997 until 2000, he was business development manager of the EMEA region of the HP Openview Telecom Division. During this period, he helped establish HP as a leading OSS provider in the region.

From 1994 until 1997, he was an eminent member of the advanced research lab of HP in UK, and greatly contributed to several HP innovations in the area of Network and Service Management for Telecom companies.

He received a Master’s degree in electronics engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in Italy

Coupling OSS and Probe-based Monitoring Mandatory for Customer-Centric View of Data Services

2008-06-25T12:38:00Z

Michele Campriani
Manager, Protocol Products Group
Sunrise Telecom

As a test / monitoring equipment vendor, we have a very unique perspective on emerging trends and challenges that operators are (and will be) facing.

One such challenge, which has surprised us in its severity and its impact on both wireless and wireline operators, has to do with managing service quality and ‘customer experience’ when introducing new data services in a converged (e.g. legacy + IP) network environment. In particular, the ‘traditional voice’ equation of “if the network is OK = QoS is OK = customer experience is OK” is no longer true for data services.

In any converged network migration, there has been a natural decoupling between the service delivered and the network infrastructure. Thus, if the operator is to provide a high quality of experience to their subscribers, they have to transition from a network-centric view to a service-centric view, and ultimately to a customer-centric view. This is much harder than it might appear.

The first step in establishing a customer-centric view is the coupling of the OSS and Probe-based monitoring systems. Until now, the roles of OSS and Probe-based monitoring in an operator network have been isolated activities, often conducted by independent departments… the OSS has always been concerned with obtaining information from the nodes and providing network-level information, while Probe-based monitoring is concerned with extracting information from network traffic and from the services themselves.

The main shortcoming of the OSS is that it must now map network elements to services, which it was not designed to do. Likewise, the main shortcoming for Probe-based Monitoring is that it was designed to look at the services and evaluate their quality, but it does not communicate with the network elements. As an example, take a traditional “Fault Management” solution from an OSS vendor: the system is able to detect hardware problems affecting the network elements, but even if they detect a particular node has a problem, they are not able to determine which service has been affected.

It has become apparent to many operators that integration of OSS and Probe-based monitoring systems is required to bridge this gap. Such integration not only allows mapping of the network elements into the services provided, but also provides information on the services and their quality… even if no faults
were detected by the OSS. Most importantly, such an integration provides “Closed Loop Management”, where instead of having the OSS simply signaling the fault, since the two systems are now integrated, the operator can troubleshoot from the point the fault was actually detected.

While Sunrise Telecom has enjoyed some early success in its partnership with OSS vendors, it is abundantly clear to us that more work needs to be done in this area, which will require companies (and internal operator departments) that never had a reason to talk, to work with one another closer than ever before. This is a classic example of the adage that “the overall system has the ability to be much larger than the sum of its parts”.

Why SaaS will flourish only with Managed Services as the building block

2008-04-18T17:14:00Z

Venu Venugopal,
VP,
CA

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a market has been heating up for the past three years. Whether SaaS is a reincarnation of the Hosted Services (or Application Service Provider – ASP) or centralized computing – that was pioneered during the mainframe era – the trend is gaining momentum. Media coverage on this buzz is plenty, whether that is general press, specialized magazines or online portals. Examples are: Wall Street Journal talking about the SaaS as a savior, KM World Magazine listing SaaS applications as trend setters of the year, coverage on Google (GOOG) acquiring Postini to augment their expanding SaaS portfolio or Microsoft (MSFT) going against Salesforce.com for the small & medium business (SMB) market with the Live CRM product.

The question one has to ask is whether this trend shakes down the Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and their long-survived grip on perpetual licensing based revenue model? Will it drive the flexibility and agility (and not to mention, cost efficiency) that businesses have been striving to attain from IT in general and software in particular?

The world-wide packaged software market is huge, about $230B in 2006, with a healthy Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) of about 8% for next five years (Source: IDC). At the same time, the SaaS market is expected to grow from $3.9B to $14.5B, a CAGR of about 30%. Whether the buzz stays or not, the SaaS market is not expected to be more than 5% of the overall software market in five years. Even if it is assumed that the same high growth rate will continue for next ten years – which is an over optimistic assumption by any means - expected dent on overall software market from SaaS will not be more than 10%.  

 Why? Firstly, pure-play SaaS will be restricted to a few areas of software for foreseeable future. Examples of these areas are HR Applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Security from the Cloud, and Supply Chain Management (SCM). Even in these areas, there are fundamental architectural issues like multi-tenancy and security that the SaaS vendors have to address before gaining wide adoption. As many of them have learned the hard way SaaS enabling of an existing software product is often time consuming, costly and in many cases technically impossible. SaaS has limited play in software segments like systems software, infrastructure management or end-point security - altogether about 65 -70% of the overall market. Not that these software cannot be served as a services; they surely can be, but only as part of an outsourced IT infrastructure (not just software) service setup. In other words, SaaS has to become part of Infrastructure-as-a-Service or IT Managed Service.

  Which takes us to the second point, that is, a more comprehensive value proposition, with flexibility, agility and efficiency as critical drivers, can be provided to a customer - whether they are large enterprises or SMB - when SaaS is delivered as part of a larger outsourced IT infrastructure framework; a framework that includes network, systems, applications, security and business processes. Centrally hosted, shared software becomes a critical component of the overall business service that the provider is offering.

The subscription based pricing and customer friendly contract models already in existence in managed services setup for a decade or more now, aligns well with the SaaS pricing and revenue model. As a managed services setup can have a mix of SaaS and other shared/unshared infrastructure if architectured well (whether it is through Service Oriented Architecture or Service Delivery Platform framework), can provide an excellent vehicle for transitioning internal enterprise IT infrastructure (including software) to an outsourced external infrastructure backed by Service Level Agreements (SLA). In other words, Saas becomes part of a larger IT journey that the enterprises have been taking for a number of years. Of course, on a number of fronts on the IT value chain, technologies, service delivery frameworks and business processes have to continue to mature for reaping full benefits from that journey.

As MSPs have started to focus more and more (finally!) on the SMB IT market (which is as big as the large enterprise market per Forrester), the synergies between SaaS and managed services are more than ever before. From the SaaS vendors’ perspective, the MSPs, if they cannot be one themselves, become a new channel to push their products into the market. Note that MSP market has large pull through power, in terms of size and growth (worldwide: $145B in 2006; 13-15% CAGR for next five years; sources: TelecomWeb, Gartner, IDC). The SaaS vendors have much to gain from aligning well with that market. And, without that alignment SaaS will continue to be a fringe play in the software marketplace. 

1 - If SaaS is less disruptive than as predicted by the pundits, why are a number of ISVs closely watching it like a hurricane? Their revenue streams are not going to dry out overnight and there are no compelling market forces overturning their revenue model that is built on perpetual licensing and maintenance contracts. The answer is that most of them have learned a lesson from the past – the emergence of Web 2.0 dominants who came from nowhere and started to deliver on a business model that is more customer centric than any of them could imagine. The last thing they want to do is playing a second fiddle to the next Google. There are parallels here. Look how a number of the legacy telecom service providers struggled/struggling during the Internet era to be more than dumb pipe providers.

(An earlier version of this analysis appeared as a blog by the author titled, “SaaS will lose steam without the fire from Managed Services”, on the GLG Expert Network. Opinions expressed here are solely that of the author and by no means represent that of his employer.)

Venu Venugopal, PhD, is the VP of Solutions Marketing at CA (Computer Associates) with responsibility for leading CA’s solutions strategy and marketing efforts into the Communications, Media and Entertainment industry. Previously he was the Director of Product Management for Security Software solutions at CA. Prior to joining CA in 2004 he was a Senior Manager for Product Management and Marketing at Sprint, where he founded and directed Sprint’s IP Virtual Private Networking and Managed Security Services, a portfolio of twelve global services. His tenure at Sprint also included positions as Senior Manager for Network Security Services and Principal Program Manager for Managed Network Services.

Prior to his eight years at Sprint, he was a Research Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a Senior Software Engineer at Wipro, Bangalore, India. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the University of Maryland, College Park, US, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Marketing. He has over 35 publications and conference presentation to his credit.

Service Management: Thoughts on trends

2008-04-15T15:38:00Z

Mark Francis
Vice President
AT&T

Over the past year, I have made the most significant shift in role that one can fathom, from being responsible for the overall Enterprise Architecture and Strategic Direction to owning the Global Network Operations Center. Some might call this a sadistic form of punishment, but I relish in the opportunity to fully understand the operational complexities and consequences of Architecture and Implementation decisions.

I will tell you this, now that I am a fully certified operations guy (grin!), I believe the most complex challenge our industry will face in the future is End-to-End Service Management. What does this mean? The ability to look at the service from a customer’s perspective and aggregate away the complexities of multiple network layers and software layers to truly understand that individual customer’s service experience. Wow!

From a Service Providers perspective, what this starts to look like is a blending of Network and IT, where the service is delivered riding over a combination of things that look like network elements and things that look like IT application servers. Together, all of these assets create the total Customer Experience. This means that in the future, it will not be good enough to have a Network Operations Center; we will require Service Operations Centers.

Within TMF, the Board of Directors has been spending considerable energy on understanding future Supply Chain directions and this issue of End-to-End Service Management. I believe TMF is on the cusp of defining a whole new set of standards areas and definitions that will establish the new focus for our future ability to not only deliver new and exciting converged services efficiently, but just as importantly, the ability to manage them at Service Provider quality.

If you have been giving this some thought and want to discuss, I would be happy to hear form you.

Mark Francis is Vice President, Global Network Operations Center, AT&T

Mark’s responsibilities include management of AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center (GNOC), the most sophisticated command-and-control center of its kind in the world. The GNOC provides incident command, network risk management, performance reporting, regulatory compliance reporting, National Security Emergency Preparedness, and executive notification for the AT&T Global Network. Proactive network management and command oversight of network infrastructure, network technology elements, operational support applications/systems, work centers, and data centers across multiple AT&T business units and lines of business. In addition, Mark manages and communicates the “Ask Yourself” process, which is a documented approach ensuring the project management and quality assurance of all planned work on AT&T's World Wide Network uses a global change management discipline. In addition, Mark is responsible for network continuity, contingency planning, and disaster recovery of AT&T Network Services infrastructure worldwide including voice, data services, and humanitarian relief deployments for wireline and wireless networks.