Managing change

There’s a new paradigm emerging for customer managed services. Driven by competition and a demand for more application-specific services, customers are now able to acquire and manage their own services. Through online portals, customers can now do things like order new services or change an existing service, perhaps requesting more bandwidth, and have it happen within minutes. And while this is great for attracting and retaining customers, it makes the job of service and capacity planning more challenging. Can the network support an additional service without impacting existing services? Is there enough capacity to support the additional bandwidth requested? 

Without this information, there’s a real risk of not being able to meet customer commitments. Data-driven operations can address these questions in real-time. By having visibility into things like unused capacity, a new or modified service can quickly be configured. Additionally, if the new service looks like it might cause problems elsewhere in the network, optimization of service routing across a larger portion of the network can quickly be done to ensure the new service can be added. Finally, since the system is always aware of capacity throughout the network, capacity planning methods can be developed to support a just-in-time methodology to upgrades, thereby reducing or eliminating unused capacity.