Posted: 07/2001
Back Office
Getting Their Money's Worth
Resellers Discover the Value of Network Monitoring
By Chris Garifo
Resellers are gaining a degree of network management capability to ensure they're getting their money's worth from wholesale partners and as a source of revenue from end customers.
The drive toward greater reseller involvement in monitoring network performance rests on how SLAs are becoming an increasingly crucial part of the wholesaler-reseller relationship. As a result, the dynamic between the wholesaler and reseller is changing.
"[Network owners] used to provide a bulk-stat download of a whole bunch of raw statistics about availability or throughput or something like that," says David Chapman, product manager for InfoVista Inc. (www.infovista.com), which develops service-level management software. "Now, they're really focusing on providing differentiated services. One of the ways to differentiate themselves is through a SLA. Well, now that I'm [trying to] meet that SLA, I've got to prove it to you."
As a result, service providers are making available a portal into their service-level management application, he says. Through the portal, a reseller can get a base-level, service-level management report on high-level statistics such as availability, throughput, response time, etc. Resellers also are being offered a deeper view into the networks.
"If you want to see specific numbers on a specific device within the environment, or a specific link within the environment--maybe errors or more granular data--what you wind up doing is paying more for that service," Chapman says.
However, service providers aren't always going to want to give resellers much intelligence on what's happening in the network. "[Service providers] aren't going to allow you SNMP-read access into your service provider networks so you can collect statistics on various routers and specific devices," Chapman says. "Instead, what resellers are doing is measuring response time with a synthetic transaction across the service provider network, or measuring their own input/output of stuff on their end and comparing it to what they believe their (SLA) should be."
InfoVista is among companies offering products that give resellers that capability. Using InfoVista software, a reseller can create synthetic transactions, such as a simple csPing or a simulated Sap R/3 application transaction, or it can measure website response time.
"A lot of times, you measure all of them so you know who to blame because you're using multiple service providers. You have service-level agreements for each of the components of the chain of your application," Chapman says. "So, you measure all of them and then you compare at the end to see which piece of them is causing you to miss your [SLA]."
Resellers can trust their wholesalers and never look at what levels of service they're receiving--they can get reports from their wholesalers and trust that those reports are accurate--or they can measure service levels themselves.
Trust, But Verify
A high level of trust must exist in the reseller-wholesaler relationship, says Tony Palma, vice president of global carrier marketing for Global Crossing Ltd. (www.globalcrossing.com).
"[That's] because we're [the resellers'] life's blood," Palma says. "We're their infrastructure, we're their back room, we're their manufacturing and we're their assembly line. There's a huge amount of trust and a huge amount of partnership that's required in choosing a carrier."
While trust is important, a maxim of former President Ronald Reagan's nuclear- disarmament negotiations--"Trust, but verify" --also holds true in an SLA-dominated environment. Wholesale carriers such as Global Crossing are taking that concept to heart.
Last year, Global Crossing launched uCommand, a web-based customer service portal designed for its wholesale customers. With uCommand, resellers get online, real-time control over order management, file transfers, trouble management, network management and billing and reporting.
"We offer a sort of cradle-to-grave concept," says Kim Harwood, director of customer interface and info services at Global Crossing.
In the strictest sense, resellers don't--and most likely never will--get true network- management capabilities. They won't be able to reroute traffic because of a network break or outage, and they won't be able to turn on and off the myriad devices used within the network. Instead, resellers will have varying degrees of network-monitoring capabilities.
However, simply monitoring what's happening on the networks won't be enough if resellers hope to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Resellers will have to be proactive in their monitoring and managing, says Gopan Madathil, director of product management at Agilent Technologies Inc. (www.agilent.com).
That means anticipating where and when network problems are occuring, even before an actual fault or breakdown happens. Although the reseller won't have the ability to reroute traffic or repair network breaks, it can contact customers while an SLA-related incident is taking place or before an outage might occur, explain the problem and how it's being corrected and what compensation will be given. Having such capabilities can head off customer complaints and reduce the risk of customer churn.
To reach the level of monitoring they want, resellers have to decide whether they want to do it themselves; rely on their wholesalers to provide the capability; or turn to a third party, such as an ASP or service bureau. Each option has pros and cons.
For instance, the in-house approach would be more expensive in capital costs and operational spending, but it offers a greater level of flexibility. Relying on the wholesale partner means the reseller, while being free from the burden of handling the monitoring itself, would have to trust that the data the carrier provides is accurate. The third-party approach would have some of the same benefits the wholesaler-provided option has, but the carrier might balk at providing much more than a high-level view of the network.
Another factor pushing network management at the reseller level is the penalties that are included in many SLAs. Those penalties can be incredibly expensive. For example, a Tier 1 carrier customer of Aprisma Manage-ment Technologies (www.aprisma.com) has SLAs that limits it to 100 minutes of outage per month, says Frank Hayes, Aprisma's director of product marketing. If the carrier exceeds that outage mark, it has to refund up to 80 percent of the bill to its customers, Hayes says.
"So, having a scalable solution that can notify them in minutes rather than hours or days saves them quite a bit of money and time," Hayes says.
Some carriers that use Aprisma's Spectrum family of service-level monitoring products also allow their resellers to tap into Spectrum's monitoring capabilities, Hayes says. In doing so, the carriers can differentiate themselves from their competitors, and they can point to that capability to show they are meeting their SLA commitments. With resellers getting so many different services from so many providers, having that ability to point the finger when problems occur can save a carrier where it usually counts the most: the bottom line.
Finding a New Source of Revenue
While resellers are discovering the value of network monitoring for their own SLA-enforcement needs, a growing trend among them is to turn network management into a revenue engine.
"We're seeing some of the larger resellers and carriers look to have interest to resell uCommand capability to their end customers," Palma says. "So, they want their customers to have reporting capabilities and order-status views and the visibility that we've provided them."
QuantumShift (www.quantumshift.com), a Novato, Calif.-based company that serves as a communications broker between its customers and carriers, recognizes a growing interest by those customers to have their own view into the network.
"We hear from our customers quite often that they would like to be able to know a lot more information about what's going on with their networks in real time," says Gail Joerger, QuantumShift's director of marketing. "They're telling me that their business has changed over the last couple of years where they're running 24/7 networks, they've got employees over all different parts of the world and all with different requirements, and it's a real struggle for them to be able to service all those employees and all their various needs for communications services and keep track of what's going on with their networks."
As a result, QuantumShift lets its customers order and delete services in real time.
Joerger likens it to the changes that have taken place in the stock-trading world, where, a few years ago, stock could be bought by placing a call to a broker. Today stock-market players can log on to an E*Trade Securities Inc. (www.etrade.com) or a Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. (www.schwab.com) to access a host of information on a specific company and then place a trade order.
"You are in control and you can make your decisions," Joerger says.
That control is what resellers are starting to achieve. For their part, carriers are recognizing real value in providing that ability, especially in light of the fact that resellers, despite lacking infrastructure of their own, have the advantage of "owning" the customer, says Agilent's Madathil. In many respects, it's a sort of trickle-down effect in which the wholesaler improves its value to the reseller by providing a greater degree of insight into its network, and the resellers can turn around and do the same by sharing that same view to their end customers.
To make it work requires a three-fold approach, says Richard Manley, director of product marketing for Quallaby (www.quallaby.com), a Lowell, Mass.-based provider of service-level management software. The first part is negotiating an SLA, which includes delineating what defines QoS, what metrics are going to be tracked, how often they'll be tracked and what the thresholds are that determine good vs. bad QoS.
Next, the method for gaining visibility into those metrics has to be determined. That includes determining how often a reseller or end customer gets reports, whether they'll get alarms or proactive notification, whether the reseller or customer has to call and open a trouble ticket before an event is counted as an outage and other factors. The third part is determining what the remedies will be, such as providing service credits, how much time the wholesaler has to correct a service or full or partial cancellation clauses that can negate a contract.
"The reseller has to know enough and have the people and processes in place to add value to this chain, or they're not going to be there," Manley says. "That means being savvy when they negotiate the agreement, being able to monitor and understand it on an ongoing basis in order to enforce it, and then being able to document it or promote it and explain it to their customers."
