While the move towards virtualization focuses on the reduction of costs associated with infrastructure and deployment while facilitating NFV standards for rapid service roll out, it also underscores the criticality of sophisticated Service Management to ensure those rapidly deployed services are working properly, without revenue leakage, and without impact to customer experience. These challenges are compounded by a virtualized environment in which the traditional lines of support demarcation between infrastructure, OS, database, and application are significantly blurred.
As Operators concentrate on maximizing revenue from existing customers with innovative service offerings they shift focus from traditional support metrics around system up-time and availability towards Service reliability, Revenue Assurance, and Availability as measured by Customer Experience. This paradigm shift clearly influences the approach to maintaining, supporting, and operating our customer platform, necessitating an even tighter collaboration with our Operator partners to outline shared Service Levels focused on key business metrics as opposed to traditional measures of system up-time and ticket turn times.
Openet has advanced this paradigm by augmenting world-class Product Support with Managed Services to focus on comprehensive Operations and Support coupled with Preventative, Proactive Service Management. With subject matter expertise spanning the entire solution stack, from product support and engineering, infrastructure and 3rd party management to application and database support, along with 24x7x365 Service Monitoring and Operations. The talent and expertise are supplemented by a sophisticated Managed Services Toolbox.
This focus on a vested interest in customer service success has replaced dated notions of reactive Production Support with interactive Managed Services that leverage CPSES expertise across the entire Solution Lifecycle – pre-production, production, integration, quality assurance, and service management.
The traditional NOC is well-suited for identifying when an outage has occurred, but not particularly well positioned to proactively identify and mitigate issues in a complex environment. In order to accommodate a proactive approach to positively influencing service outcomes, the traditional red light/green light NOC is evolved with sophisticated Service Management tools and philosophies that operate more like a trading room floor than a NO, where key metrics and trends are monitored proactively and continuously tuned to maximizes desired outputs.
Managed Services, serving as a Single Point of Contact for subject matter expertise across the full solution stack in an end to end partnership with Operators to smooth Service introduction, testing, deployment, and ultimately Service Management once deployed is essential to the successful monetization of the NFV model. It is not sufficient for Service Management to cover only vendor specific products, as service quality is driven by the entire service chain; therefore, the service, as well as the tools and instrumentation developed are platform agnostic, built on open standards, and readily extended to the entire solution space.
Product Support, as a key component of the Managed Services offerings ensures that product specific issues identified during solution triage and/or monitoring are quickly resolved and/or relief provided. This essential functional encompasses expertise around the core product as well as any customized components delivered.
The mobile market is changing, how operators are using BSS is changing, and the rules of BSS service management are changing.
