IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings - IP VPN

Convergence a Foundation to Unified Communications

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:38:34 +0000

As with any new technology you will find different opinions of what you should consider and do when deploying new technology.

Recently Zeus Kerravala from Yankee Group posted a blog urging enterprises not to consider VoIP as a foundation for deployment. Stating concerns of complexity and that only a minority of enterprises completing their VoIP deployments.

I would like to offer a supportive opinion that can be found in a whitepaper that my peers and I have recently released. You can download a copy here.

The whitepaper is based Global Crossing’s experience of deploying Microsoft’s Office Communication System within our internal IT infrastructure as well as recent market data.

Global Crossing was successful in deploying a Unified Communications platform (text, email, video, voice and data) within the last 24 months (Live Communication Server in 2006 which was upgraded to Office Communications System in 2007) based on efforts which were completed in 2004.

In 2004 , Global Crossing deployed an internal network infrastructure (LAN and WAN) that was capable of providing convergence of Voice, Video and Data. Not only did Global Crossing deploy a network, more importantly we broke down the traditional silo’s found in IT departments across Voice, LAN and WAN teams.

This foundational element enabled application layering (VoIP, Video, Data) that is available in our full featured Unified Communications platform today.

Enterprises considering a Unified Communications deployment will need to deploy a stable, converged network in conjunction with a presence enabled framework.

VoIP and IP Telephony - The Benefits Revisited

Fri, 16 May 2008 01:29:07 +0000

Over the past 14 months i've met with many different customers at many different levels. One thing I continually do is talk about the benefits of converged technology such as VoIP and IP Telephony. The last few blogs have leveraged convergenced as a foundation for unified communications as a next generation service offer but in this post I thought I would try something different and revisit the benfits of some common technology - VoIP and IP Telephony.

Most people understand the benefits of transitioning to a converged all-IP environment. As more applications come onto the market and the technology proves itself, these firms will be able to avail themselves of the many benefits of such converged technology adoption.

So why consider leveraging VoIP and IP Telephony?

· Offers advanced call routing and enables new applications to further customer service initiatives.
· Accelerates and facilitates the move from a legacy environment to converged networks.
· Anchors IP innovation across the enterprise, and helps deploy a web services infrastructure enabling rapid development of IP-based applications and services.
· Facilitates the deployment of real-time workforce collaboration tools, which fosters an environment of high worker productivity, innovation and information sharing.
· The market isn’t moving towards converged networks – it’s there! Therefore the adoption of IP and VoIP are foundational steps on taking you down that path.

What are the benefits of VoIP and IP Telephony?

· Voice over IP can bring customers the benefits of network optimization and greater value through the convergence of services over a single connection. One IP network will handle data, video and voice.
· It can reduce total spend on traditional telco services by converging voice and data onto one pipe, eliminating the need for leased line charges from a telephone service provider, since all calls are flat rate.
· Depending upon the design all calls may be on-net as is the case with Global Crossing’s VoIP Onnet services. Compared to traditional TDM solution with the exception of private voice networks the majority of calls may be delivered off-net and thus more costly to operate from a call perspective. Fully converged services extend the on-net “look and feel” through our enterprise VoIP network. Instead of building their own TDM networks and deploying proprietary on-net calling plans, customers will gain value by leveraging a service providers VoIP network such as Global Crossings.

IP telephony adoption also delivers the following benefits:

· It can help lower cell phone charges by enabling worker productivity on the road and remotely.
· It reduces high toll, long-distance usage.
· It facilitates real-estate consolidations through extension and directory mobility by leveraging VoIP with “find me follow me services”.
· It reduces PBX support issues by migrating to fully converged network-based services that are centrally located.
· Packet-based voice traffic becomes just one application running over a multi-service network, allowing for more efficient bandwidth utilization.
· With dynamic bandwidth allocation technology in the absence of voice traffic the full network is available to data traffic.
· The move to IP telephony is a good first step towards convergence, and allows for more sophisticated network management by running voice over an existing data network.

What are the possible challenges in deploying VoIP and IP Telephony?

· Converged networks can be more complex to operate – the LAN’s additional complexity needs to be managed. This complexity can be offset through a managed VoIP solution.
· The business processes associated with troubleshooting and managing network quality need to be well-defined.
· Depending on the age of the network already in place, the transition to IP telephony may require some additional costs associated with hardware requirements such as advanced telecom gear to replace older equipment as well as replacing the end telephone stations used for traditional telephony with advanced IP-enabled sets.
· Additionally, if power over Ethernet is chosen there may be additional expense associated with powering the handsets.
· Finally, VoIP requires advanced traffic management and statistical analysis on edge and core components in order to track and trend network utilization and problems appropriately. Such systems may not necessarily be in place which would require further network management software to be deployed.

There you have it .... some of the VoIP and IP Telephony benefits revisited. There are cetainly more but those are just a few that I captured this evening.

IP Convergence: Foundation for Unified Communications

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:48:39 +0000

I had the opportunity to present the latest message from Global Crossing in support of Unified Communications. On March 27th, I attended a panel discussion at Sun Microsystem's Boston campus for masnetcomms.org and on March 28th I presented at a Global Crossing VoIP seminar in Cleveland.

My massnetcomms presentation was focused on the technology enablers (Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), XML, Service Oriented Architecture, Price performance of general purpose computers , Software As a Service model, Network Convergence (IP and access), Protocol Convergence (SIP)) that have created the opportunity for Unified Communication adoption. Unified communications is not a new concept, it’s about 10 years old and really never took off. The early UC models were all hardware centric with specialized devices and lacked seamless integration into your desktop. However today, companies like Microsoft have taken a software only architecture that leverages their installed base of email (exchange) and identity (Active Directory) into realizing a seamless experience on my desktop.

In Cleveland, I shifted the discussion to a more network centric message and highlighted our internal IT success in deploying Microsoft OCS . Global Crossing’s internal IT team began the road to Unified Communications in 2003 when we deployed Cisco VoIP handsets .

The 2003 VoIP deployment was an important milestone in that both the network (LAN, WAN) and operations (Voice vs. Network team) had to come together and provide a reliable and consistent transport for Voice, Video and Data. This is an excellent example of IP convergence providing a solid foundation for our subsequent deployment of Unified Communications.

In 2005 Global Crossing deployed Live Communications System (LCS) (LCS is the predecessor to Office Communications System (OCS) ) and in 2006 our first deployment in support of Microsoft OCS beta. Global Crossing was one of 72 companies supporting the beta and tap phases of OCS and in October 2007 supported Microsoft with their OCS launch in San Francisco.

What we are experiencing is that not only can OCS provide unparalleled integration into our desktop environments, but more importantly business transformation as it is now embedded into our workflow, sales portals and company directory. We are able to work more efficiently , with better communications which will add to a better customer experience.

But the deployment of Unified Communications didn’t start in 2005 when we deployed LCS, it actually started in 2003 when we began deployment of a converged network.

At both presentations the message reasonated with other industry leaders and customers. Clearly IP and network convergence provides the foundation for a successful deployment of Unified Communications.

The Value of Presence ? That is the question.

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:13:38 +0000

While visiting with several individuals a few weeks ago at the Ziff Davis Unified Communications Summit in Seattle, WA I noticed that some people hadn't yet realized the power of one aspect to the overall value of unified communications which relates to presence awareness. That is leveraging presence not just in instant messaging but in other communication vehicles can play an important role in transforming your business impact as an IT organization. As a result I thought I would dedicate this post to help create ideas around things that can be done to assist in helping IT in leading the way.

Here at Global Crossing in an attempt to leverage this core components of Unified Communications in an ongoing effort to incorporate the advantages of collaborative, converged services within our enterprise we've transformed internal applications from static non presence aware to anticipatory engaged communication tools that are supporting contextual collaboration with presence-awareness throughout the enterprise. In this instance presence-awareness (whether someone is available in simple terms and how to contact) is utilizing capabilities including chat, computer-based telephony, conferencing, IP video, and e-mail across tools that leveraged across the enterprise drive in principle more efficacy from consumption and corresponding execution. In fact it is my opinion that since presence has been embedded into our application infrastructure to enhance our collaborative capabilities it is natural to see transformational improvements occur around our "quality of experience" associated to the overall user experience. This is so because enabling enhanced customer experience truly enables the IT organization to drive one more component to our IT organizations transformational success in enabling the business to not only "react" but be proactive by achieving extensibility required within the distribution transparency model required for execution. Said another way the fact that presence awareness has been integrated into our application infrastructure means this action will further enhance our agility to enhance operational efficiency by allowing application "pivots" to be present thus accelerating communication by eliminating in some instances serial cognitive task execution.

As the industry landscape continues to evolve there are a few constants that will remain the same: (1) increasing business demands require more innovative, transformational capabilities between employees, partners and customers and (2) continually driving operational velocity reductions around the cost basis of delivering information technology services is imperative. It is commonly believed by many vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Intel, Nortel and Siemens as well as software developers such as IBM and Microsoft that presence technology will continue to become an increasingly important tool at driving traditional costs out by attacking the serial nature of traditional work execution thus increasing operational efficiency.

So why is presence so important to Unified Communication services? Presence is important because it can become the intelligent communication application for converged IP communication services such as those demonstrated by our IT organization at Global Crossing. Determining where a user is and how best to reach them in our case by leveraging presence enabled applications that have been integrated into our infrastructure with the "glue" to increase the overall value of our converged IP services brought to the table and help realize substantial business transformation value.Said another way presence-aware applications offered on a converged IP communication service help evolve traditional serial actions of quickly determining and thus engaging with employees regardless of location, modality or scheduling which allows our globally dispersed users to communicate and collaborate in real time providing productivity in a truly global and mobile workforce environment. Combined converged IP communication services with presence technology provide for accelerated collaboration between our employees, partners and customers by knocking down the walls of traditional serial communications and by accelerating communication through anticipatory engagement.

Presence is the value.

QoS and your PC

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:08:50 +0000

In a comment on this post from one of our readers, Christopher Wacker writes:

To me, it sounds like you A/V issues lie with your networking. I work for a MPLS consulting firm (if you don't know what MPLS is, you can take a look at http://mpls-experts.com/default.asp?page=pages/whatismpls.asp&v=nontech for a brief overview of what MPLS is) and have noticed this problem quiet often with companies. Are you currently using ATM/Frame Relay?

I am somewhat familiar with MPLS. :-)

I was an IP Engineer at Frontier Globalcenter when we were doing our rollout of MPLS back in Q1 1999, which coincidentally was the first deployment of MPLS in any production IP network anywhere. We deployed the mesh nationally in Q2 of 1999, and according to our primary core vendor at the time (Cisco), we were the first carrier with a nationwide deployment of MPLS. With the acquisition of Frontier by Global Crossing, we began building new POPs internationally in Europe and Latin America over the first half of 2000, and our US domestic MPLS core became an international one..

It was a tough time for us to deploy MPLS. The standard was so new it wasn't even a standard yet, it was still in draft. There were lots of bugs in our vendors' routing code. Deploying Juniper created additional complexities because each vendor interpreted the RFC's and Internet Drafts (pre-RFC's) differently, which occasionally led to some very interesting network behavior.

But I digress.

Towards your question around the use of ATM/FR, I am not directly connected to our corporate network with ATM/FR or MPLS, which is the root of my problem and a common plague of the telecommuter. I use a local ISP who buys transit from someone other than Global Crossing, and the performance is often less than desirable.

For the sake of argument, let's say that I was connected directly to the corporate MPLS network, would my QoS problems be solved? Would I be able to set different ToS bits on the video packets coming from communicator compared with the voice? As near as I can tell, there are no such settings in MS Communicator 07, and if that is true, then all packets originating from my computer will look like any other data packets and will not get any special treatment on the network.

QoS on MPLS works great, but if you can't differentiate packets in some way (IP address range, port range, or ToS bits) you won't be able to take advantage of it. Usually, differentiating packets within the same application (say OCS) is impossible to anywhere other than the application itself. I say usually because it is possible that if the application uses different ports on seperate rtp streams, and you can tell which one will always be video and which will always be voice, you can probably work something out on the CPE router to classify the packet, but it would certainly be easier to just set the parameters in the application.

Perhaps one of our readers knows if it is possible to set the ToS packets within OCS?

Virtualization – Part 2 - The Abstraction of the Computer

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:16:06 +0000

Here's the second part of our Virtualization series and a continuation of Virtualization - Part 1 – The Abstraction of the Internet.

A computer consists of several key elements that along with software (and firmware) provide useful applications like the browser you are using to read this blog from our web servers.

Here are some of the items that are noteworthy:

Central Processing Unit (CPU) – aka Pentium for you wintel folks, is the heart of the computer and executes instructions (software or firmware) that are programmed by a software engineer.

Input/Output Devices – Provides a method to enter , display or share information from the computer, for example: Display, keyboard, mouse.

Random Access Memory (RAM) – Is memory that is accessed by the CPU which losses its contents when you remove power. RAM (Typically) is the fastest memory that a CPU and “read” or “write”.

Disk Drive – Is memory that is also accessed by the CPU which doesn’t lose its contents when you remove power. Disks are slower than RAM.

Flash Memory – Is like RAM but has the characteristics of a disk drive.

Data Bus – Depending on the CPU (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or 64 bits wide) is where the CPU can read or write data from or to the various memory devices, Input/Output devices. Each bit is a “1” or “0”.

Address Bus – Also dependent on the CPU , this is where the CPU (using bits) selects the location in memory to read or write data.

Firmware – aka BIOS for wintel folks, is software that is used to “boot” (restart from a known state) the computer that resides in Flash memory or a Programmable Read Only Memory (PROM).

Software – eg Office.

Operating System – eg Windows, is a layer of software that abstracts the hardware and controls the overall operation of the computer.

Networks – Are communication systems that allow computers to share information.

Programming Languages – A CPU can only understand binary (“1” or “0” s) for the instructions it executes. There are various instructions to read , write, add, multiply, subtract , divide and move data. However, Humans need to abstract the instructions into words to make it easier. These languages define the way words are used forming a grammer (just like English or Spanish) . The first form of languages are assembler languages which are specific to a CPU and not portable, the subsequent languages like C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal provided more functionality with Database languages like 3GL, 4GL etc..

A computer can be a main frame, a desktop or your laptop which were confined to a area (room, your desk or your lap).

Advances in networking have provided efficient methods of distributing the CPU from Disks, Input/Output devices.

Storage Area Networks are clusters of disk drives that are no longer directly connected to the computer using the various buss’s described above. This is a key level of abstraction which has allowed distributed computing to evolve into GRID computing where the software is one place, the CPUs in another and memory in yet another. Distributed computing provides more efficient use of computing at unparalleled level of disaster recovery.

Why is this important?

Computing has and will continue to be the mother of invention for advances not only in the hardware or software but also in the networks that connect everything together like the Internet or also an Enterprise VPN.

More later :

Virtualization – Part 3 - The Abstraction of Applications
Concepts of a Application Programmers Interface (API), examples and pitfalls for APIs and the abstraction of Web Services.

Google 2.0 is here - Introducing free Google 411 for Voice

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:32:12 +0000

Wow, things really do happen fast and a great example of “internet time”.

Here’s the result of my prediction on March 19th.

Watch out Voice based directory services have just been disrupted and expect Google to be leader in this space.

Will 2007 be the year of significant VoIP Adoption?

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:04:32 +0000

Seems that the financial community has started to understand how companies offering VoIP services need to be reevaluated.

Today Credit Suisse reiterating their position on Sonus Networks, resulting in an almost 6% increase in stock price - Sonus' 52 week high.

Look at Vonage and they have over 2.2 million subscribers, an almost 50% increase from the 1.4 million subscribers in 2005.

For Global Crossing, the future looks brighter everyday. And it's just not me saying it, it's the analysts and media as well.

INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine has recognized Global Crossing VoIP On-Net Plus Service™ with its 2006 Product of the Year Award.

VoIP On-Net Plus is a service that recognizes that transformation into the VoIP world is not a flip of a switch, it's a transition over time. VoIP On-Net Plus allows an Enterprise the ability to share a private dial plan across their TDM and VoIP sites.

We use it internally and it's great to not have to remember 10 plus digits to contact any resource across the globe.

Check it out!

A Call to Action by the VON Coalition

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:18:22 +0000

Although I support and wish them luck, a call to action to remove VoIP barriers internationally is a daunting task.

In Jeff Pulver's blog dated December 15th, 2006, I quote my comment dated December 18th, 2006:
"Jeff [Pulver], I wish you and the VON Coalition good luck.

However it may be an up hill battle that is based on each countries political and bureaucratic process. Let’s not forget that the incumbents grew out of the PT&Ts (Post Telephone & Telegraph) and they would act in the best interest of a country and not the market.

History has many examples of how this played out, remember the proprietary signaling protocols across international boundaries, remember that some PT&Ts were successful in blocking entire NPAs in an effort to stop international toll bypass.

Countries like India have embraced VoIP as a technology enabler to grow their share of the outsource call center market, but stop short of allowing VoIP to originating or terminating within their PSTN.

Other countries like China have adopted a policy of licensing and setting the cost at (un)reasonable level – estimates as high as $2M US.

You may want to take the India policy as an example of allowing VoIP to enable a market. And replay this to countries like Malaysia which are up and coming outsourcing countries – as a start."

Take a look at a Global view VoIP regulations as developed by the Global IP Alliance.

Typically, countries have taken an open market approach to spur innovation, a middle ground approach to control innovation and a “not in my back yard” approach to stifle innovation.

A PT&T approach of stifling innovation is a near sighted perspective to protect tax revenue and the incumbent’s control – far a market perspective the market will move those calls via VoIP to countries that are either in the open market or middle ground approach.

For example, US and Europe are open market countries, India is a middle ground country, and China is “not in my back yard” country.

So how can you move China into the middle ground?

I think we should use India’s logic, in providing cost effective communications (VoIP inbound/outbound) to support outsourcing while leveraging low cost labor.

Will Managed Services Become a Requirement for VoIP Mass Market Adoption?

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:17:28 +0000

I have been a fan of Geoffrey Moore for over 10 years and have found his book entitled “Crossing the Chasm” both inspiring and true to life.

Crossing the Chasm defines a technology adoption cycle across atypical buying patterns across a generic industry.

The early market is segmented into 2 groups – 1. Technology Enthusiasts (sometimes referred to Early Adopters) and 2. Visionaries.

While the mass market is segmented into 2 groups - 1. Pragmatists , and 2. Conservatives

With the laggards in technology acceptance are found in the last segment - Skeptics.

The key to reading this graph is that a product/service revenue is the area under the curve. Clearly the mass market represents where the money is to be made , while the early market and laggards represent a small percentage of potential revenue as it relates to the mass market.

Product and Service adoption generally follows a “product adoption process” defined by “The sequence of stages that individuals and firms go through in the process of accepting new products. The stages vary greatly in usage, but tend to include (1) becoming aware of the new product, (2) seeking information about it, (3) developing favorable attitudes toward it, (4) trying it out in some direct or indirect way, (5) finding satisfaction in the trial, and (6) adopting the product into a standing usage or repurchase pattern.”

One of my roles at Global Crossing is supporting our product teams on industry analyst meetings in both a technical and customer facing aspect on Advanced Solutions. General industry estimates suggest a small percentage of deployed IP-PBXs in the US are managed.

Do these estimates suggest a historical trend that will play out in future years?

Or do these estimates suggest production adoption cycle where the 400,000 IP-PBX deployments are representative of the early market and that the mass market will require management of these IP-PBXs?

I tend to feel the later is in play. Why?

The early market , typically , in technology adoption tends to be more technology inclined. They accept new technology with little or no documentation , work thru pioneering adoption issues and are very forgiving. While the mass market is not.

The early market will take technology risks, while the mass market will not. Global Crossing adopted VoIP within our internal operations starting in 2002, clearly a early market adopter. We had (and have) the technologists, the willingness to adopt and the patience. Today over 65% of the user base and over 90% sites use VoIP daily.

Another role of mine is supporting our sales channels in solving customer requirements that are beyond our generally available products that are considered Advanced Solutions. Within the last 3 months I have seen several large Mutli-National Companies (MNCs) move from a ‘let’s build a new VoIP platform’ to “let’s buy and use an existing , operationally proven VoIP platform’.

Connect the dots, place your bets that managed VoIP will overtake unmanaged VoIP as it becomes adopted by the mass market.

Universal VoIP Peering Faces a Known Road

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 03:05:09 +0000

I read an interesting article tonite entitled “Universal VoIP Peering Faces a Rough Road “

VoIP peering is not a flip of the switch. Look back at history as to how the PSTN was built – over time and by market forces.

Bell’s initial success was in local operations, and over time these local operation islands were connected as part of “ATT long lines”. In the US , Bell didn’t have a lock on all local operating markets, there were numerous independents: GTE, United, SNET, Rochester Telephone, etc.... The success of the early PSTN required an ability to terminate calls outside of a LEC footprint, and even required diplomatic functions for international termination.

The move behind VoIP peering is a uni-lateral move by all providers to be free of PSTN regulations, tariffs and government. The benefit for providers is lower cost and competitive freedoms; the benefit to consumers is greater options.

Let’s look at a more recent example of technology based islands, ISDN. ISDN early promises of adoption were plagued by a lack of national (and international) standards, both ATT (now Lucent) and Northern Telecom (now Nortel Networks) had competing technology implementations, both fought within the standard bodies to have a lock on the accepted standard that bonded LEC ISDN islands. And in the US National ISDN2 became the standard bodies that provided a pathway to ISDN connectivity, add ETSI and the ITU international interoperability became a reality.

It took a fragmented ISDN standard to become a ubiquitous service almost 10 years.

VoIP, SIP, IP are interoperable today and had become a pathway for VoIP peering.

The road to VoIP peering is not a rough road but a known road. The early pioneers who provide that vehicle will be part of the new VoIP based “long lines”.

The problem with P95

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:26:03 +0000

I attended a meeting last week with a customer in the Media & Entertainment space, and one of the topics of discussion was that the standard billing method that most ISP's use doesn't work well for their type of business.

The standard billing method that I am referring to is P95, or 95th percentile billing. What we do is measure the input and output traffic on each circuit connected to our routers. Our equipment collects the interface counters every 5 minutes (approximately) and divides the result by the exact number of seconds since the last collection to get the rate. For example, over a 24 hour period you will have about 288 samples for each direction (in/out). We take out the biggest 14 of those samples and then use the remaining largest sample as the billing rate.

Most of the time, this works great. On your typical large ISP traffic trend you'll cut off the very top of the peak providing a good billing rate to traffic volume fit, like this (the red line indicates the P95, the rate at which the customer is billed):

On a content providers circuit this works pretty well too. Even when they have an "event" where they double their traffic due as the result of a new movie trailer release or one of their other providers going down, they don't pay for the traffic unless it's a regular event.

In the media business, or at least certain segments of that space, it is common to see much more erratic traffic patterns, such as a line rate usage for a couple hours out of the day. Doing some reverse calculation, the 14-15 samples in a day that get discarded comes to 75 minutes, and if you transfer a 200 Gig file in the morning on a DS3, assuming 40Mbps throughput, that transfer will take 83 minutes to complete. After throwing away the top 15 samples showing 40Mbps, the 16th sample (which gets used for calculating the monthly bill) is also 40Mbps, so you got charged for 40Mbps of bandwidth even though you only used it for barefly more than an hour each day. The graph below does not perfectly illustrate the situation, but it is a weekly traffic graph from a real media customer of ours in Los Angeles.

There are two potential solutions for this problem.

Option 1) and probably the easiest option is to develop a pricing model that is by the Gigabyte instead of P95 of the rate. Since we know exactly how many Gigabytes are transfered, all we need to do is calculate a price/gig that will yield a more competive rate and remove some of the calculations from the billing and rating algorythm.

Option 2) and much more complicated is to build an event system where the amount of bandwidth can be automatically re-provisioned for the customer either as the result of an XML data input into our customer portal or as the result of some other automatic feedback mechanism such as link threshhold monitoring with an event trigger. Tie that in with automated network provisioning tools, and a billing system that can support a large number of pro-rated bandwidth purchases over a given month.

Why do the more complicated one when you've got an easier solution at your disposal? To solve the specific problem, option 1 is most certainly the way to go, especially in the short term. Option 2 has the advantage of setting the stage for a massive increase in functionality, particularly when it comes to having applications automatically manage how much of a particulary QoS/CoS they need in order to operate properly.

If you've got ideas on how Option 2 might pave the way for you to do some interesting things for your business, drop an idea in our suggestion box by leaving a comment.

Advanced Solutions are an Art (Part 2)

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:07:18 +0000

I’d like to expand on my thought process from my last blog on Advanced Solutions are an Art (Part 1).

When I closed the blog , and I quote:
“Advanced solutions are an art, anyone can propose a solution, not everyone can deliver one that meets customer needs while still being economically feasible.”

I wanted to continue the discussion and start a dialogue as to what a service provider actually provides on a day to day basis?

A service provider provides a service, a service is defined by the technologies, the processes, the systems and most of all the people within the service providers environment.

All of these define something I like to call the “Service Layer”.

A service layer in this context addresses 4 key capabilities within a service provider:
- Sales
- Service Delivery
- Maintenance
- Billing

Lets take a moment to peel the onion on each of the capabilities:
- Sales includes the following functions: sales engineering, account management, customer support, pricing, marketing, proposal development that all lead to an order.

- Service Delivery in the process of orchestrating the delivery of individual components that together provide a complex service, the capability is completed when the customer accepts the service and the service provider can start billing.

- Maintenance is by far the most important capability, like I said, anyone can sell a service, anyone can delivery a service, not everyone can support the service when a customer calls at 3am!

- Billing from a providers perspective is the really important, after all providers are meant to provide a return on investment, and just as important to enterprises as provider costs are typically a cost center and accuracy and support are key.

Maintenance is so important, we’ll do a deep dive in Part 3.

Advanced Solutions are an Art (Part 1)

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:28:57 +0000

I have always felt that Software engineering is an art. Anyone can write some code, but not everyone can develop a system that is flexible and maintainable .

Flexibility is important, as requirements tend to change and grow with use of a system and subsequent learning.

Maintenance is even more important in that you need have a cost effective way of achieving Flexibility , and not throwing parts of the system away and building upon proven parts of the system.

That is the art of Software on a hardware platform, and together they solve a problem and form a complex system onto itself. Expand this thinking into the definition of a Service Provider.

A service provider is a collection of complex systems - switches, routers, service provisioning , trouble ticketing, monitoring , billing as well as the people and centers that complete the service layer.

Service providers - like software engineering is an art - anyone can deploy a switch, anyone can expedite an order on the new switch. Not everyone can operationalize an offer that is both flexible and maintainable.

Flexibility is important as customer always want more and equipment vendors always deliver more features.

Maintenance is really important when it comes to a service fault that occurs at 3am during a long weekend.

A service is not something you can touch, it's the experience and customer satisfaction is its metric.

Advanced solutions are an art, anyone can propose a solution, not everyone can deliver one that meets customer needs while still being economically feasible.

"Stupid Networks" and the Need for Application Performance Monitoring

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:49:00 +0000

Folks, convergence is gaining real ground, enterprises globally are reaping the benefits of a single pipe providing voice, data and video.

These benefits are realized in both soft and hard cost savings.

Hard costs in that enterprises no longer need a separate local loop or tail circuit for their voice or data connections, nor separate customer premise equipment , separate vendors , etc…

Soft costs in that enterprises no longer need a telcom support group , LAN support group or WAN support group.

Martin Geddes has made a name for himself as to what he calls the "stupid network" and I had to challange him on this topic.

But can a really stupid network provide the expected level of convergence? When we talk about convergence of combining voice, data and video on a single pipe, are we under estimating the ratio of data as compared to voice and video?

I think we are.

Let’s take the move of converging storage onto an IP network.

IT departments no longer need a separate network (fiber channel, EMC proprietary, ) connecting servers to storage, it is as easy as an IP address for the server and a IP address for the storage device.

Here is a real example of what the expected level of convergence can provide – more DATA on really stupid networks.

But what happens when performance doesn’t meet expectations? How can an enterprise determine how these really stupid networks are doing?

You could deploy Sniffer’s , everywhere and at a huge cost.

Or you could add intelligence into a really stupid network that can provide Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

And that is what Global Crossing has accomplished with our partner Fluke/Visual Networks.

Not saying that our network is stupid, it is not and we are very proud of the reach , consistent performance and most importantly - operational maturity.

But the addition of APM onto a converged network is the difference between night and day.

Enterprises now can experience the benefits of hard and soft costs savings without being blind sided by increasing the data demands (e.g. my SAN example above) and not being able to determine route cause on a proactive basis.

Check it out , it’s very cool.