WAN providers, you’re being watched

WAN providers, take note: Your enterprise customers may soon gain greater visibility into how well (or poorly) you’re managing their networks, and they may use those newfound powers in crafting more stringent service level agreements (SLAs).

PacketDesign has been helping service providers monitor and analyze their multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) networks and virtual private network (VPN) services for years. But last month the company began offering similar products directly to enterprises, allowing them to become watchdogs to the telecom service provider world.

“We’re sort of this arms merchant,” said Jeff Raice, PacketDesign’s executive vice president of marketing and business development. “We originally armed the service providers…Now we’re arming both sides. And whoever gets [our product] first, the other one’s going to need it too.”

In particular, enterprises may ask for new criteria in SLAs based on PacketDesign’s enterprise gear.

“Prior to us, there were no SLAs along things like reachability and policy,” Raice said. “People don’t ask for SLAs against something they can’t monitor. Now we’ve created this tool for enterprises to monitor these important things they never could before. And we’re saying, ‘Why don’t you put them into SLAs?’ We have customers telling us they intend to. Now the service providers better make sure they have a tool, that they’re doing that properly.”

The vendor’s enterprise and carrier products are “fairly comparable,” Raice said. “If you have VPN Explorer, you’ll be alerted to all the problems that MPLS WAN Explorer will tell the enterprise about.”

PacketDesign’s WAN Explorer allows enterprises to monitor three things in particular, which the vendor calls reachability, policy and privacy. Reachability, which PacketDesign calls a “superset of connectivity,” includes ensuring that sites can communicate (even when the link between them is not down) by detecting when routing addresses are withdrawn. Policy involves ensuring that network capabilities are in accordance with agreed-upon terms of service. And security includes alerting customers to dramatic changes in addressing that could be the result of router misconfiguration.

One of the demand drivers for an enterprise-based solution is the fact that particularly large enterprises often use multiple service providers for WAN management. If each one offers its own SLAs, that could make things even more complex for the enterprise, unless it uses a common system to monitor performance across all those networks.

PacketDesign also contends that selling its systems to enterprises could give them greater comfort in turning their networks over to managed service providers because they will be able to closely monitor those providers’ performance.