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Overview
Service providers in the communications, media and entertainment industries are undergoing significant changes in the types of services demanded, competition faced, and the technologies and business models that can sustain and grow their business. They must demonstrate agility and flexibility not only by rapidly deploying new services with very short life cycles across a diverse set of subscribers, but also by rapidly decommissioning services that do not meet business goals. Operators are under intense pressure to increase customer satisfaction, improve customer service and gain better understanding of their customers’ behavior. Underlying each of these imperatives is the need to improve overall quality of the network, the services offered and each customer’s experience. Yet operations teams are also under scrutiny to reduce operating and labor costs, boost efficiency and hold down capital expenditures. This paper outlines methods to help service providers improve overall operational efficiency within the service assurance operational environment. It then discusses innovative IBM Tivoli® Netcool® solutions that can help service providers streamline their operations, improve responsiveness and reduce costs. Consolidate operations management for end-to-end service management Many service providers are burdened with managing a large number of different service assurance systems from multiple vendors. Some operators may have as many as 15–20 event and performance management solutions owned and operated by different internal teams, all of which must be managed to understand and improve the performance of the entire network. Future networks will only become more complex. IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) and fixed-mobile convergence brings together wireless, broadband,data, landline and enterprise networks to an IP core, all of which must be managed for a unified view of network availability and performance. To streamline, service providers need to consolidate their fault and performance management systems with solutions that support multitechnology, multivendor infrastructures spanning wireless, wireline and IP domains. Operators need a way to collect and distribute network and usage data to various operational support systems (OSS). Many operators have multiple mediation systems, usually designed to support one specific OSS. Consolidating to one mediation platform with the same collection, processing and distribution process, user interface and data recovery mechanism can dramatically reduce administration costs and improve data integrity. Service providers also find it extremely difficult, given the complexity of their network environment, to obtain a consolidated view of performance, availability and quality from a network, service and customer experience perspective. The reality is that the service assurance environment typically contains numerous silos that must be broken down and integrated across multiple domains, including access, core, IP, value-added services (VAS) and backhaul networks. By consolidating event data into a single platform, organizations can enjoy complete visibility of the entire network infrastructure. This allows them to assess the physical and logical components of the networked infrastructure, understand the linkage between connected components and gain consistent views for operations, management and customers. Also, with an end-to-end service view, organizations have broader and deeper visibility into service quality and the customer experience.
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