Management World: 'Cleaning house' a back-office priority as capex spending slows

OSS vendor InfoVista, which is launching an updated version of its VistaInsight for Networks service assurance platform at the show, said its customers these days are “all focused on maximizing their networks.”

“They need to have a good understanding of where network traffic growth is coming from and how to optimize that traffic,” said Grégoire Michel, InfoVista senior vice president of marketing and business operations.

One of the major trends with newer IP networks and services is that service providers must monitor their services, and not just their networks, to truly guarantee performance in an IP-based world, Michel said. “They have to move from monitoring just network performance to monitoring service performance. If you can’t explain why the quality [of a service] is getting worse, you can’t plan for capacity on the network, and you can’t anticipate how you’ll want to develop the service moving forward.”

Service providers are also relying on more intelligent, process-driven back-office systems to help them deliver new services much more nimbly. Business process vendor Savvion will be demoing the Savvion Communications Foundation, a set of capabilities carriers can use to quickly build new back-office applications. Savvion built its own, recently released Communications Order Management solution on top of the foundation; operators will now be able to use the same plug-and-play capabilities to build their own apps, said Sanjay Kumar, vice president of communications and media solutions at Savvion.

“The merging of industries – cable players, telecoms, content providers – has introduced the idea of rapid change and the challenge of rapid change,” Kumar said, noting, for instance, that new service deployment in the telecom industry has typically taken months, if not years. Service providers need more flexible back-office systems that allow them to try new things – and even fix mistakes – essentially “doing some future-proofing in a rapidly changing competitive environment, and at a low cost.”