The Crooked Mile

Once upon a time, in a land known as The Network, along the road called Quality, there was a parallel path called the M&M highway. It was used for monitoring and managing The Network. It was noisy, full of bells and whistles and gongs. It was fanciful, blazing with flashing red and green lights. It was crooked, forced into twists and turns and sharp angles by tinkerers and proprietary ideas. At the end of this loud, chaotic, crooked road was Nirvana, known by some as the self-healing, self-managing network.

As it is in many fairy tales, nobody has actually seen Nirvana, but that doesn't stop people from trying to get there. And until they do, they'll settle for the next best thing. In this case, that includes managed services, out-tasking, service visualization and modeling, embedded technologies and simply better, more capable network systems and devices.

Having the luxury of delegating the task of network monitoring and management or other operational tasks to others may not be Nirvana for some network operators, but for others it gets close.

Over the next five years, 60% of wireless operators will have some form of managed network services, said Reuben Chaudhury, director of the communications, information and entertainment practice for Mercer Management Consulting.

Chaudhury and company recently completed a study that showed a significant surge in interest and adoption of managed network services. He said the market nearly tripled from 2004 to 2005, going from 17 major contracts to 43.

“After sputtering along, it suddenly seems to have picked up, and there is a greater degree of interest,” Chaudhury said.

Why the sudden interest? Well, it's not that sudden if you consider the first really big managed network services deals — such as the one at Telecom New Zealand — launched back in 2000. And although 60% of wireless operators will go the managed network services route in some form, not all of them are true believers in the concept. In fact, only about 20% of that 60% are firmly convinced.

Chaudhury considers many network operators, particularly wireline operators, to be skeptics. The rest are the explorers like Vodafone and Telefonica that are willing to start pilot projects.

Although network management technology has advanced along with the rest of the industry, it is not improved technology that is driving operators to reconsider managed network services. It's money. And it's the business model.

In Asia and parts of Europe, for example, there are more emerging wireless players than elsewhere and owners that are more investors than historical network operators. “They are not in the telecom business; it is just another investment for them,” Chaudhury said. “And as they expand outside their core geographies, they automatically run into not having the right assets or skill sets there. As a result, it is natural for them to look for managed services.”

However, in all cases, he said, “The financial argument has always been paramount.”

So far, although leading network managed services companies such as Ericsson and Lucent/Alcatel and the up-and-coming Nokia have proved they can deliver results, Chaudhury said, concern still lingers and the market awaits more proof points.

In North America, operators are starting with what Chaudhury calls out-tasking rather than outsourcing. This includes farming out field maintenance and network monitoring. In this respect, wireline operators, particularly in the broadband arena, are keeping pace with their wireless counterparts.

Although not shown in the recent study, Chaudhury said, “Empirical evidence suggests that a significant number, I would even say the majority, of broadband providers are already engaged in some sort of out-tasking.”

Another market driver for broader adoption of these services will be the shift from network management to application monitoring and management. “As soon as operators like Cingular and Verizon are forced to introduce applications rapidly, the pace of change will force operators into partnering, and that will [initially] take on the shape of hosted applications. Over time, it will take the shape of outsourcing. The trend is irreversible in my view,” Chaudhury said.

Also changing shape may be the suppliers of these managed services. Although network equipment manufacturers currently control the market, Chaudhury says the time for companies such as IBM and EDS to step in is coming soon. They have been trying, but haven't succeeded greatly, he said. Their eventual success depends on the rate of adoption by service providers of IP multimedia subsystem-based next-generation networks.

IBM Tivoli's Scott Sobers, director of the service provider market, said the company already is doing a lot of outsourced network monitoring and management. From a capability standpoint, the company made a key acquisition last year in Micromuse — which had just previously acquired Quallaby. It has been careful thus far about defining the right road map to incorporate these performance and network management technologies into its Tivoli management portfolio.

“It's our ‘no customer left behind’ strategy,” Sobers said. However, despite greater interest in outsourced network management, he said the road ahead is neither smooth nor straight.

The speed bump in the road is the ongoing evolution from network management to service management. And for IBM, despite the trend toward a blending of IT and operations, which works in its favor for being a leader in network management and monitoring, it doesn't have any special shock absorbers.

“If you are talking outsourcing network operations, that's one thing, but when you start talking about outsourcing a service, like online gaming for example, that's an application that requires the full OSI stack from Layer 1 through 7. How do you outsource that?” Sobers asked.

He said that managing applications and services is not just a technical issue; it's also an organizational one. “IT and operations may be coming together, but if you look at most Tier 1 carriers, the operations are still in silos, and they still battle for budgets,” Sobers said.

This, he said, would require certain organizational changes that allow an outsourcer a view not just into the application infrastructure, but into the business processes as well.

So although IBM will take what outsourcing opportunities present themselves, it is concentrating on enabling that transformation for network management to service management. It has launched several initiatives, which have not yet been announced, around performance management and end-user quality. The company's user quality management initiative is developing tools that will give wireless operators the ability to monitor end-user experience and provide a human-perception evaluation of how services are performing at the handset. It will provide a mean opinion score along with up to 20 different metrics back to the operator.

After that? “The next big wave is measuring performance and visualizing the entire service by getting our hands around all the components that make up a service and look at it end-to-end,” Sobers said.

One way to do that is by using technology such as that from Telchemy. This 7-year-old company, which already has approximately 2.5 million copies of its flagship VQmon (voice quality monitoring) software embedded in network elements and devices worldwide, is paving its way to Nirvana with technology that analyzes the performance of real-time multimedia streams.

“Our approach is to use a combination of fairly conventional approaches to measuring the performance of services and diagnosing problems with a new and radical distributed model,” said Alan Clark, president, CEO and founder of Telchemy.

That model is to put embedded analysis technology in both network elements and end-user devices in order to get real-time visibility of service quality, estimates of user perceived quality-of-service and detailed analysis of the root cause of quality degradation. Its technology is embedded in about 70 equipment vendors' products, network probes such as Agilent Technologies' and Brix Networks' and numerous test companies' products, such as those of the aforementioned Agilent, Empirix, Sunrise Telecom and Tektronix.

In addition to these OEM relationships, Telchemy recently deployed directly with AOL. Telchemy technology is embedded into AOL clients to give AOL a way to monitor service quality on its voice-over-IP (VoIP) service, even for communications that do not come directly through its network.

“The ideal situation, from a service provider point of view, is to have some software probe embedded in the customer premises equipment that can monitor calls, detect problems and efficiently get that data back to a central collection point,” Clark said.

Digital signal processor vendors such as Texas Instruments have begun to deploy Telchemy technology in products, which in turn give VoIP phone and gateway suppliers the necessary performance data. “We call this the VoIP Performance Management Framework, but it is applicable to video as well,” Clark said.

Telchemy's ultimate goal is that Nirvana of the self-healing, self-managing network, and in order to do that, Clark said, you have to have real-time information on just about every call.

“From day one our mindset was that VoIP problems were likely to be transient,” Clark said. “So if you rely on going back and trying to replicate problems or wait for someone to complain, you may never find them. So we thought the best model was to monitor every single call in the network and encapsulate the information about the call in an extremely efficient way.”

The combination of probes and software agents with embedded network element technology is designed to provide that — someday.

“We are providing the tools that will eventually lead to Nirvana,” Clark said. He envisions his technology enabling, for example, two wireless devices to detect degradation in their individual communication and automatically adjust codecs or routing.

“There is real-time feedback occurring now. People aren't using it yet, but there is quite a bit of interest in it,” he said.

Another path to Nirvana is to take advantage of the new IP-based infrastructure and simply provide more intelligent systems. For small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), it starts with taking the plunge into a VoIP infrastructure.

“With traditional key systems, there is no way to monitor performance. There's no way to get to the guts of the system and see what's going on,” said Henry Kaestner, CEO of Bandwidth.com.

Kaestner's company solves that by offering a full-featured hosted IP service for SMBs in the retail industry. It's like doing for the small guys with outsourced network management what the big guys have already said here they can't do. The scalability and unique requirements of Tier 1 carriers go a long way toward explaining the difference and reasons why, but that's why the world creates niches and companies to fill them.

For some, the crooked mile is a little straighter than for others.