Hi, I’d like to introduce you to InfoVista News.
For TEMS users used to receiving TEMS News, InfoVista News represents TEMS in our new home within InfoVista. To all those receiving this letter for the first time, I’d like to extend a very warm welcome to you to engage with the network performance, analytics, and technology expertise at InfoVista and some of the people behind that expertise. In this first edition of the new series, we cover topics including APIs in NFV, planning of initial deployments of IoT networks, the path to 5G, and use of our service assurance solutions for two very different scenarios in mobile networks, maximization of backhaul quality of experience and revenue assurance.
This version of InfoVista News covers our solutions for communications service providers, both fixed and mobile, and will give you access to the latest product news, tell you where you can meet our experts, and offer our thoughts and perspective on industry hot topics. You may also be interested in our Application-Aware SD-WAN offering for digital enterprises – please reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about SD-WAN or maximizing application performance over any complex network, or visit us at home at www.infovista.com.
James Morrison
SVP Marketing & CSP Product Strategy
Our team always tries to offer the benefit of its insights into key topics, such as the evolution of radio access towards 5G. While standardization is an ongoing process, a clear pathway appears to be emerging, but it’s also evident that there isn’t going to be a big bang revolution. 5G will be built following an evolutionary path from 4G with iterative steps.
Revenue assurance and fraud reduction are key concerns in our industry – a recent report from the TM Forum suggests that 1.5% of total industry revenue is lost to fraud. That’s a staggering amount, which also has a massive impact on profitability. Clearly, reducing this has a direct impact on the top line. So, what can be done?
As part of our program of enhancements to the TEMS Monitor Master Range, we’ve introduced a new Revenue Assurance solution. It’s available as a boxed package, which means it’s ready to go and can be deployed quickly and easily. It helps CSPs by enabling real-time identification of billing issues, preventing problems before they have a real financial impact. In turn, this results in a reduction of the number of calls to customer call centers, which has two effects.
First, happier customers – if customers can be confident that the CSP is protecting them, enhanced satisfaction will result. In particular, as fraudulent activity can often follow patterns, CSPs can more easily spot suspect behavior, identify vulnerable customer segments, or users with specific tariffs and services that are being targeted, which means they can proactively defend customers and provide relevant alerts and notifications. Second, call center agents can spend their time on other issues, which means resources are not wasted. So, not only is fraud avoided, but there’s a clear impact on operational costs too.
TEMS Monitor Master achieves this with a unique, unattended 24/7 end-to-end monitoring system, the generation and comparison of CDRs and continuous verification of billing and rating functionality, which means operational teams can be provided with constant vigilance – another weapon in the fight against fraud.
Learn more about how TEMS Monitor Master can help you.
One of the interesting things about the growth of IoT services and applications is that there is a much wider range of requirements than we have been used to seeing. This range of requirements has led to the emergence of several different solutions and approaches to support diverse use cases. This applies not only to the specific applications, but also to the connectivity devices will need.
Q: Hi Chris! APIs have been much discussed over the past few years – what makes them especially relevant today?
A: “That’s true, APIs have been around forever, but the latest buzz centers around the coming, software-defined age of networking. Networks are transforming from strictly hardware-based entities to software-enabled and even software-defined dynamic entities. The key element to harness the agility enabled by this transition is orchestration, with an implicit requirement for automation. That automated orchestration requires all the operational elements within the network (management, fulfillment, ordering, assurance, etc.) – plus the network itself – to interoperate, without manual intervention. So, the network and OSS/BSS elements must be programmable and that’s why there is so much discussion surrounding APIs.
There are numerous APIs being used, built, standardized, requested and discussed, in particular in the realm of OSS. In this webinar, we are focusing on service assurance, including today’s drivers in the context of software-defined ‘everything’ and how those drivers impact service assurance and the requirements for programmability that inevitably lead to APIs.
The industry is – rightly or wrongly - looking at APIs as the ‘solution’ for everything and this is hugely relevant in the emerging field of Networking as a Service (NaaS), but the challenges are many – covering key questions such as, what are APIs, who’s defining them, how are they standardized/adopted, and what’s the path to get from today’s revenue-generating network assess to tomorrow’s NaaS?”
Q: Are there any specific areas on which we should focus our attention?
A: “Yes, absolutely! One example is Lifecycle Service Orchestration or LSO, which is perhaps the most coordinated framework on which the industry is working to standardize APIs, and specifically their reference points. But there are numerous, overlapping initiatives involving traditional SDOs and Open Source projects such as ONAP, which originated from ECOMP. ONAP did not use LSO reference points but it’s loosely following a similar framework and may one day converge to LSO. As a result, APIs are becoming central to our discussions with customers as they look to integrate, interoperate and automate their networks and OSS/BSS environments.”
Q: Finally, how can InfoVista share its experience to help with this issue?
A: “InfoVista’s leadership and expertise is proven and widely recognized, with our multi-vendor LSO proof-of-concept which garnered the MEF 2016 Excellence Award for Multi-Vendor Innovation of the Year. It’s a template for the transition to fully automated, cloud-based enterprise services, across multiple operator networks – a true showcase for LSO, so we want to share this experience and highlight our learnings for the industry.”
Christopher Cullan
Director of Product Marketing, Business Services Solutions
Would you like to learn more? View the on-demand webinar now!
As fronthaul and backhaul evolve to meet the requirements of networks that are more complex, carry heavier traffic loads and include more real-time traffic, mobile operators face new engineering and operational challenges. In this conversation between Monica Paolini, Principal at Senza Fili Consulting and Cyril Doussau, Senior Director, Service Assurance Product Line at InfoVista, you will learn how Service Assurance requirements are evolving to meet MNO demand for solutions that help them realize the benefits of the latest network transformations, such as C-RAN, NFV and SDN.
InfoVista will soon be integrating the various InfoVista and TEMS social media channels.
This integration will provide customers, followers, and employees single InfoVista social media touchpoints for LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, and Twitter.
We are excited about this initiative, and believe you will be as well. Please be on the lookout for further communications about this upcoming event to take place early June, 2017.
We’re usually in attendance at the industry’s leading shows, so why not find an event near you and take the opportunity to find out how we can help you plan, deploy and optimize your network?
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