OTOT: Tools to monitor carrier performance/customer needs:
Internet telephony
internettelephony.com
August 16 Issue
Telephony's COVER ISSUE
Ready To Wear
As carriers take a formulaic stance toward service level agreements,
homogeneous contracts are spreading throughout the industry. Can a
one-size-fits-all approach meet customer demand?
HANNA HURLEY
Service level agreements, like mass-produced T-shirts, are popping up
everywhere. Although both items have a history of coming in and out of style,
each is now quite fashionable. The T-shirt, once an invisible undergarment, has
become shabby chic. The SLA, once a private contract, is now proudly bared.
The SLA's move into the public eye is a recent phenomenon. Previously, the
agreements were individual requirements the customer set for a carrier. Only the
largest companies had the technical acumen to describe and retain the
contracts. Times have changed, though, and SLAs have shifted shapes as
carriers have recognized them as one more way to break out from the crowd.
Unfortunately, SLAs--like T-shirts--are becoming commodities. Rather than
defining their service, the one-size-fits-all approach guarantees network
performance, but it isn't designed to meet a customer's unique business needs.
Because the carrier sets performance standards, there's no reason it shouldn't
be able to meet them.
This homogeneous, prepackaged approach is a clear sign of the SLA's
immaturity. Like cliquish teen-agers, SLAs haven't found a unique
personality--and they are not getting much guidance. It's unclear who is
delineating the boundaries for SLAs: customers, carriers or testing
manufacturers. Manufacturers say customers are demanding a variety of SLAs
that meet their business needs, and carriers say SLAs help them be heard above
the noise of their competitors. However, current SLAs outline little more than
basic service metrics (Table 1).
Historically speaking
Less than two years ago, SLAs were one-page documents negotiated by
enterprise customers and carriers to meet the business' specific needs. When
asked about SLAs, carriers were slow to answer and hesitant to provide
details--the stock answer was, "They are created on a case-by-case situation."
Those days are gone now, and SLAs have shifted from the back room to the
corporate boardroom. "The growth of e-business has brought the CEO to the
table, and he is demanding a contract that guarantees that his business will not
go down," says J. Lightsey Wallace, principal consultant at Lightsey
Enterprises. "The CEO may not know technologies, but he knows how much an
hour of downtime will cost him and how much of that money is irrecoverable. The
purchasing agent and the business perspective have changed."
Once top executives took notice of SLAs, opportunistic sales and marketing
teams saw the contracts as a way to differentiate their services from their
growing list of competitors. New entrants into the market found SLAs especially
appealing and were quick to embrace the service contract philosophy.
"We launched our first SLA initiative on Aug. 4, 1998," says Katy Caldwell,
director of global customer-care programs for UUNet. "Before that time, we had
some big customers that had custom contracts, but within three months, SLAs
became a standard requirement for all contracts that came through the door.
"We've gone from providing bandwidth to providing service. To us, an SLA is not
just a contract or sales tool. We use it to constantly improve our business,"
Caldwell says. "SLAs allow us to track all the information and then improve the
quality of our business."
Approximately 99% of UUNet's customers with dedicated connections have a
standard agreement with four components. The first component measures the
latency on UUNet's backbone and guarantees its threshold. The second
component guarantees 100% availability and includes credit information in case
the service is unavailable. Notification of down service is the third component; the
last is an installation guarantee.
Like UUNet, e.spire has similar categories within its SLAs. The six categories
are network availability, installation, latency, delivery rate, 24-hour network
management support and credit commitment. As a new player, the carrier views
SLAs as a value-added service that separates it from competitors.
"We've created a comprehensive framework for SLAs that encompasses six
areas," says Howard Hempenius, vice president of product marketing for e.spire.
"It's consistent with what we need to do in our market because, as the
alternative, it's important that customers recognize that we are a quality provider
with quality services."
Whether this trend toward one-size-fits-all agreements will endure is uncertain.
Carriers may find it too restrictive. "For service providers, the more cookie-cutter
services they can create the better, but a cookie-cutter SLA that does not meet
customer demands is inappropriate," says Tony Mazraani, director of product
marketing at e.spire. "Service providers must find a happy medium between
creating customized agreements and supplying excellent service so that
cookie-cutter SLAs suffice."
With these standard SLAs, all customers receive similar service, yet invariably,
these customers want personalized attention. Soon SLAs may shift back to their
former shape--and become more definitive and granular in their nature so that
they can meet the specific needs of the customer.
"SLAs will be extended closer to the customers and tie in more directly with the
customers' business," says Mark Budniewski, high-speed packet services
manager for SLAs at AT&T. "Each company has its own niche of mission-critical
applications, and each [chief information officer] and [information systems]
manager will want tighter measures based on the standard suite."
My way or the highway
A customer's main--and often only--concern is the responsiveness of the
applications it is running on its network. This application approach to determining
network performance is counterintuitive--typically, carriers aren't managing either
the last mile of connectivity or the elements on the customer premises. While
customers may demand SLAs on application response time, looking at the
network's responsiveness from a customer's perspective is difficult for carriers.
Difficult as the problem is, though, carriers are taking a stab at it because
customers are quick to comparison shop. Many service providers have bought
network monitoring tools that originally were created for the enterprise and are
using them to analyze their customers' networks.
"We're seeing activity from service providers trying to understand if the problem is
due to the network or the application. Our technology allows carriers to separate
end-to-end performance from the ability of the network to deliver the data," says
Jim McQuaid, director of monitoring solutions at Ganymede Software.
"Ultimately, the application view will prevail because businesses only care about
the applications. They don't want to think in terms of all the technical pieces in
between."
CrossKeys Systems Corp. is another company that provides carriers with tools
that produce statistics from a customer's point of view. CrossKeys' Resolve
solution collects and analyzes network data so that service providers can
measure what they are delivering.
"We found that operations guys couldn't prove to customers that they were
meeting their commitments. We've bridged internal systems to the outside
world," says Steve Adams, vice president of marketing at CrossKeys.
e.spire uses Resolve with its network management system. Raw data from the
system is fed into Resolve, which then keeps track of e.spire's performance
metrics for its SLA. In many cases, carriers will buy a tool such as Resolve to
track the performance for one major customer; eventually, new customers will be
added to the system as the number of customized SLAs grow.
Another tool used by many carriers to maintain and measure their network
performance is Visual Networks' Visual UpTime. AT&T, MCI WorldCom and
Sprint are using Visual UpTime to measure their frame relay performance and
provide service monitoring tools to their customers. The various offerings include
AT&T's Frame Relay Plus, MCI WorldCom's Circuit View and Sprint's
Web-based Network Manager.
"These services give customers confidence in their service and reassures them of
its quality," says Peter Luff, marketing manager for the carrier program at Visual.
"Ultimately, it will attract more traffic to carriers' private lines."
Another way carriers are attracting customers is by providing them with network
performance metrics. Customers have begun to demand that carriers prove that
they have met their end of the SLA bargain. Sprint, UUNet and e.spire post SLA
reports on a secure Web site for customers. AT&T is considering providing
reports to its customers and is testing the service with a small number of
customers. However, AT&T posts the performance of its backbone on its Web
site (Tables 2 and 3). Customers can view the network's delay, loss and monthly
averages.
On the other end of the service monitoring spectrum is Williams
Communications, which is hired to monitor the performance of other carriers'
networks. Williams alerts customers in case of a network outage and tracks
latency, delay and bursting. The company uses Micromuse's NetCool in its
network operations center, which monitors the CSUs, frame relay switches and
other network elements. The devices are tested roughly every minute, and the
data is correlated and available from the one monitoring tool.
"We link into all the manufacturer-specific systems and gather information from
each element," says Michael Cadorette, senior manager of network engineering
at Williams. "This technique gives us an overall, end-to-end look at every device
along the way."
Hard-line negotiations
Network performance tools help carriers deal with one of the most difficult
problems surrounding SLAs: customer perception. Now, carriers and customers
can view the network with the same tools and work together to fix the problems.
One problem that will be more difficult to solve is wholesale SLAs among
carriers. "One of our main challenges is that [competitive local exchange
carriers] don't have points in every market," says e.spire's Mazraani. "It's hard to
offer SLAs to end customers because we can't always rely on the service from
suppliers."
Carrier customers are much more demanding than enterprise customers, and
SLAs between carriers are more difficult to maintain.
"There's more data to collect and process, there are scalability problems and
there's so much more revenue involved," says Dave Gellerman, vice president of
corporate development and technology at Hekimian Laboratories Inc.
"Carriers are sophisticated negotiators, and they have extensive buying power,"
says Bob Copithorne, CEO of Clear Communications. "They are the toughest
customers because they will demand the most, and they will monitor the
performance."
SLAs are expected to continue maturing during the coming year, mostly due to
monitoring tools' expanding feature sets. Many of the tools will be adding an
overall view of the network to provide real-time information rather than only
historical data.
"The next round of products will collect up-to-the-minute information and
summarize performance on a Web page that will tell how the business is
performing, not the network," says Mario Pidutti, product line manager for GN
Nettest.
Another critical need for carriers trying to maintain SLAs is the ability to combine
the monitoring tools, the SLA metrics and operations support systems (OSSs),
such as billing and provisioning.
"SLAs that work in tandem with business support systems and [OSSs] will be
very powerful," says Lightsey Enterprise's Wallace. "SLAs that flow through the
system, and validate the service that is delivered and fix failed service will reduce
the anxiety level between the customer and service provider, which will build
customer loyalty."
Patrick Power, product manager for ADC Metrica, a subsidiary of ADC
Telecommunications Inc., agrees that more integration among monitoring tools is
required. "An SLA is well and good, but it needs to be combined with
customer-care systems and provide feedback to customers. They need to be
able to view the performance levels with the contract."
These wish lists from carriers and manufacturers will reshape SLAs and cause
them to undergo more redesigns, which will continue to alter the industry's
perception of SLAs.
At this point, the future for SLAs is not nearly as precarious or volatile. SLAs will
continue to change shapes, but as they mature and become more meaningful,
the contracts will fit the form of the carrier's service and the customer's needs.
These new designs--made with input from customers, carriers and product
manufacturers--will represent ready-made performance upon which carriers will
build their business. |
