Alcatel-Lucent aims application assurance at VPNs

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) is applying to business virtual private network (VPN) services the application performance assurance capabilities it introduced for the residential triple-play market last year.

A new version of the Application Assurance Adaptor (a line card for the vendor’s service routers) and some reporting and analysis software allow telecom service providers to manage VPN-based services without deploying appliances at the customer premises.

As more applications become managed and hosted from data centers, the performance of those applications over the VPN network becomes more important. Carriers have typically addressed this issue with appliances at the customer premises, Alcatel-Lucent said, but this new offering allows them to do so strictly from the network.

The 10-gigabit-per-second card uses deep packet inspection to monitor each application’s performance and resource consumption on the network and allow carriers to set policies for performance control on a per-customer, per-VPN and per-application basis.

The system comes programmed with the understanding of about 100 of the most common business VPN applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP and streaming video. But it also includes a toolkit that allows carriers to teach the system new or custom applications.

“By using some IP and TCP protocol port information, they can add new application types to the signature list, and we can monitor and control those as well,” said Manish Gulyani, senior director of business services strategy at Alcatel-Lucent. “Just add a line item to the app policy configuration to ID [the new app] without service interruption.”

Alcatel-Lucent believes its gear can allow carriers to offer applications including software as a service (SaaS) directly to businesses or offer performance guarantees to SaaS providers and application service providers. Just as in the residential market, where the vendor is positioning its performance management gear to allow carriers to collect revenue at both ends of the network – charging users for service quality while charging content owners for it as well – a similar model may work in business services, Alcatel-Lucent said.

The vendor also expects carriers to use its gear to sell high-definition videoconferencing services on demand over shared infrastructure rather than dedicating large pipes that often go unused.

And because the same card now supports both residential and business applications, carriers can use their service routers to support app performance in both worlds.

The line card is available now, and the software for VPN service monitoring will be available in June, Alcatel-Lucent said.