Radiant Communications beats bigger players with specialization, customization

More than 40% of Canada’s largest retail chains and thousands of other small- and medium-sized businesses depend on Radiant Communications for their mission-critical data networks and enterprise-level applications. The company competes against bigger players through a mantra of “Always There” and “specialization” in the world of fiber optics–, radio frequency– and IP-based products for business customers.

In light of mandates by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that ILECs provide wholesale services, Radiant has now gained access to ILECs' footprints through wholesale network-to-network interfaces.

As a result of this and other pressures from MSOs to decrease the number of subscribers per node to increase bandwidth speeds, Radiant has turned to Monolith Software to ensure its client network connectivity would meet SMBs’ high-availability needs.

Because the company boasts customer service as a differentiator compared to larger network providers, the organization wanted to further improve customer service and reduce calls to its tech support queues through its call centers. “Companies are aggressively installing fiber to the curb or to the home to compete, so we have Ethernet over copper, which gives us a five-to-seven-year time frame to upgrade T-1 and DSL customers while ILECS battle about what to do with CRTC mandates and competiton from cablecos,” said James Martin, director of technology strategy for Radiant.

To stay competitive, Radiant wanted to offer business customers self-care options by opening access to its networks. “We needed correlation, dashboarding, and [service level agreement] reporting capabilities to help us manage our clients’ sites and the stringent SLAs they have in place,” Martin said.

By integrating Monolith with its Microsoft CRM system, Radiant could proactively respond to managed services customers when equipment would go down. “The system automatically generates trouble tickets and allows us to monitor in real time the status and performance of services utilized by managed services customers,” Martin said.

Where Monolith seems to “shine,” he added, is with its “multi-tenancy and multi-dashboard engine,” which he feels offers Radiant more flexibility in how information is presented to customers through the online portal. “Before we were limited to event and metric data, but now we can show graphs reflecting bandwidth utilization and availability, as well as gauges, dots or numbers indicating different geographies of Canada or North America to show how many customers’ sites are ‘good,’ ‘impaired’ or ‘hard down,’ and then we can drill down into the issues.”

With version 3.5 of the Monolith solution, Radiant now has a URL widget that enables it to put a Web service on its operations support system gateway. “We can put the URL into dashboards so people can view trouble ticket information and overall network status messages as though they were in our support queue,” Martin said.

The hope is to soon allow customers access to the CRM portal so that customers can hop between the trouble ticket portal and CRM portal with ease.

“Our portal(s) should be better than what business get from a larger providers," Martin said. "If they can buy a circuit like DSL/MPLS for a higher price point, we manage it at a lower cost and with better customer service; that’s how we compete against the bigger incumbents.”