Keeping a step ahead

Service providers need to look beyond basic IP resource management for next generation service delivery

Earning greater returns on IT investments has been a major concern for many service providers as they try to turn infrastructure investments into profitable, competitive services. Network equipment and architecture investments are inevitable, but working to narrow the gap between investment and profitability is critical.

Service providers must assess how to best leverage the broad choice of tools available to them to overcome barriers to service delivery, increase their service capabilities and meet customer expectations. In looking at their operations support system (OSS) requirements and the solutions available, however, many service providers lose sight of the need to manage their underlying IP resources and its significance for their service delivery and growth strategies.

IP service fulfillment is no longer about delivering basic services to end users and businesses. Today it is about the providers' ability to create personalized, high-value services that enhance customer loyalty. The competitive marketplace of the future will be defined by how fast service providers can deliver the unique packaging of applications and network services to meet the varying needs of their consumers. The ability to rapidly tailor and test new services will differentiate the commodity players from the value-added providers (Figure 1).

The range and volume of data traversing today's IP networks creates endless possibilities for service providers to deliver new, innovative services. From basic needs such as e-mail to advanced Web hosting and e-commerce applications, businesses want service providers to supply and manage turnkey solutions instead of maintaining their own costly in-house technical staff to manage their network services. The delivery of specialized IP services represents an estimated $23 billion market opportunity (Figure 2). To address this market, service providers must assess their IP resource management and service delivery requirements to determine what types of services they are prepared to support. As they develop an infrastructure that supports an environment in which customers can self-provision services with the click of a mouse, they need to address the service delivery requirements needed to advance their systems for the next generation of services.

Service providers should consider the following steps when looking at IP resource management and provisioning challenges:

- Creating a framework for controlling IP address management, including an accurate view of current IP address assignments

- Overcoming manually provisioning services and devising a scalable solution that shortens time to revenue

- Uniting disparate directory services and databases for managing IP resource, user and service information into an integrated system, simplifying the bundling of service packages.

Traditionally, service providers have managed IP resource data across multiple directories, without a system-level perspective of the services to which a customer has subscribed. Because service providers cannot share information across multiple directories, they cannot automatically distribute information about user profiles or IP address changes to the directories and network elements that control service delivery. Using a directory-based IP resource management solution lets service providers streamline this process.

If service providers cannot overcome these challenges, they will experience limited success in reducing time to market for, and maximizing the return of, new services. IP resource management and service provisioning represent the most significant barriers to deploying services such as DSL and IP virtual private networks (VPNs). Addressing this challenge can be the difference between activating a subscriber immediately and struggling to turn up the service over a period of weeks.

Breaking down the barriers Today's IP resource management solutions have, in Internet time, a relatively long heritage, with the market growing out of corporations' migration to TCP/IP-based intranets in the early 1990s. As a result, service providers often struggle to find solutions that meet their unique requirements and dedicate a full staff to manually managing IP resource and service data or they attempt to develop their own automated solutions in house.

Tracking name and address information manually or with a semi-automated tool can be problematic. Manual administration of the addressing scheme, selection of available IP addresses, calculation of subnet masks and IP address to domain name associations in a complex network becomes virtually un-manageable without an automated system. Without an accurate record of the assigned domain names and IP addresses, service providers have no method to reclaim statically assigned addresses no longer in use, leading to inefficient use of address space.

These traditional approaches make it difficult to respond quickly and efficiently to requests for new services. In addition, manual and some commercially available systems do not enable service providers to manage multiple private address spaces - a functionality required to support merger and acquisition strategies and provision services to customers using private addressing schemes.

The market for these solutions continues to evolve, and, as a result, service providers need to assess their IP resource management vendor's strategy for their products. As vendors anticipated and predicted in a March bulletin, IP resource management solutions targeted at the service provider market must offer a comprehensive service delivery strategy that integrates management of IP resources with subscriber and service data.

By leveraging a centralized, directory-based IP resource management solution, service providers can first address their immediate challenges and use these solutions to deploy a service strategy, enabling a more easily managed relationship between users and the network.

This approach to service delivery creates a standards-based solution used to create and manage services in a multivendor network environment.

All in the provisioning Overcoming the provisioning barrier lets service providers free up personnel and network resources.

A typical industry approach for provisioning new subscribers involves the customer service staff collecting IP addressing data for each network client or subscriber and then e-mailing this data to the domain name system (DNS) administrators. The DNS staff then manages each request individually, providing information on when the order will be completed. If the information provided is incomplete, the DNS staff must contact the customer service staff for additional information before the request can be finished. This approach prevents service providers and customers from responding to requests for service in a timely manner.

By centralizing customer information along with critical service-enabling data, a directory-based service management solution can provide the back-end data repository that drives IP address and resource management and can be extended to drive service provisioning and management across a network.

Starting with a solution that delivers integrated management of user, device and service data gives the service provider a framework that helps it overcome basic IP management issues.

For instance, overlaying an IP VPN service over a known and managed IP addressing structure facilitates service deployment because it gives the service provider a centralized view of the addresses available to assign to the devices comprising the IP VPN. Initially, service providers can use an IP resource management solution to address network design issues and develop an addressing plan to support IP VPN service deployment. This directory infrastructure also can be used to store IP VPN definitions, quality of service parameters applied to an IP VPN and the association of specific customers to an IP VPN service (Figure 3).

These customized services then can be mapped to the network infrastructure and to other OSSs associated with service delivery. By combining this data in the centralized directory and deploying a Web-based service delivery mechanism, customers will be able to quickly self-provision changes to their service levels or profiles over the Web, increasing or decreasing bandwidth as needed, and customizing service bundles to meet their changing needs (Figure 4).

Looking beyond their immediate IP management needs, service providers should consider an IP management solution that fits in with their overall service delivery and OSS.

To achieve its vision of deploying a wide range of electronic services, some service providers need a solution capable of managing their own and their customer networks. Many current systems cannot accommodate the growth of business because staff relied heavily on manual updating and multiple handoffs to activate a new customer. Several service providers look for assistance in three areas: service creation, service delivery and service management.

One way to address these concerns is to use an Internet name and address management solution. The solution can allow a service provider to expand its dynamic host configuration protocol, or DHCP, deployment, more effectively manage requests for high-speed service and free up staff members.

Service providers trying to deliver new services and move network investment to profitability should first investigate how to manage their IP resources. Considering the vendor's strategies to not only address an immediate pain point but also the vision for evolving their IP resource management solutions into the engine of a comprehensive service delivery solution can save time, effort and expense. With the rate at which increasingly complex IP services are being deployed, service providers require a solution equipped with flexible feature sets and open interfaces to back-office systems. These solutions also must be directory-enabled to allow easy integration with the service provider's operations and infrastructure.