The Visionael Story

Managing Network Change

CIOs and network management professionals at enterprises and telecom services providers are wrestling with the complexities of planning for and implementing the next major networking technology shift – the migration to an IP-based environment. Industry analyst firm Gartner, Inc. estimates that by 2006, nearly 70 per cent of the PBX systems deployed in Europe will be IP-enabled or pure IP, with similar trends in North America.

Effective network management in this new environment is essential as revenue-generating applications for such critical functions as financial management and customer relationship management will also be integrated with the IP backbone to provide converged voice, data and video capabilities. Increasingly, regulatory requirements are also contributing to additional workload to validate how the network operates. Any changes to the network, if not well planned and executed, can disrupt business operations and undermine compliance, resulting in loss of customers and revenues.

The Need for Automated Asset Management

Developing an IT Asset Management strategy is a key step in assuring effective network management. Enterprises and service providers need to know what’s in their networks to better manage them. They are in need of tools that will allow them to automatically discover and document their devices, including how those devices are configured on large, distributed, complex networks. Once this documentation is in place and easily sharable, enterprises and service providers have a workflow framework to ensure that as their networks evolve or as new services or devices are being introduced to the network, they are able to make the best decisions to respond to these changes.

Unfortunately, recent research conducted by Gartner shows that fewer than 30 per cent of global enterprises have an automated asset management system in place to assist them in managing the wave of network migration and transformation. Currently, enterprises are using traditional manual methods such as spreadsheets to document their network infrastructure. Performing this task manually puts enterprises at risk: as their networks evolve, IT managers will not have the most current documented view of their networks from which to make key decisions. As a result, any new technology, application or service is being introduced without fully understanding the potential consequences. These disruptions can lead to failures in application or service deployments, such as the industry is experiencing now with the increasing number of high-profile VoIP deployment failures.

Triple Play: Opportunity and Risk

For service providers, one of the most prominent opportunities – the bundling of voice, data and video to offer Triple Play services -- also carries enormous risk. Network build-outs are capital intensive. While they need to build ahead of customer adoption to ensure that they can provision new services successfully, service providers also need to ensure they are not so far ahead of the curve that they incur excessive capital expenditures. More importantly, they need to reduce their risks in service rollouts and ensure positive customer experiences. With Triple Play, a lost customer doesn’t mean the loss of a single revenue stream, but potentially, the loss of any future opportunity to sell the rest of the bundled services to that customer.

The Visionael Solution

Visionael provides telecom service providers and large enterprises, including government organizations, the tools and insights to automatically discover and document their IT assets. With the latest version of the company’s flagship product, Network Resource Manager (NRM) 7.3, enterprises and service providers will have access to accurate data at their fingertips to plan changes and effectively manage their business risks.