ibm service management for communications service providers - csps

White paperDecember 2008

IBM Service Management forcommunications service providers

IBM Service Management Solutions™

http://www.ibm.com

http://www.ibm.com/tivoli

IBM Service Management for communications service providers

Contents

2 Overview2 Key service management

challenges3 IBM’s service management

approach4 Asset management5 Configuration

management6 Service assurance7 Security management8 Data management9 The IBM Service

Management for CSPsframework

11 Summary12 For more information

Overview

Communications service providers (CSPs) today face a world where

continuous change is the norm. Traditional PSTN revenues are declining

rapidly, and only single-digit annual growth is forecast for broadband and

mobile voice through 2011.1 At the same time, a wide range of new, content-

rich services from IPTV to music to gaming are set to generate billions of

dollars in new revenues.

This shift to a diverse set of high-touch services is fundamentally changing

the CSP business model. CSPs now need to innovate continuously to deliver

customer value and must also embrace the creativity of their business partners

to succeed against aggressive competition. Delivering an accelerating pipeline

of new services to market quickly, repeatedly and cost-effectively demands

unparalleled agility. Focus on customer perception is essential to drive service

adoption, and to protect and enhance a CSP’s biggest asset—its brand.

IBM has worked with CSPs to jointly define essential capabilities needed to

prosper in this new landscape. This white paper focuses on one important

component of this service lifecycle—service management. It covers key

challenges, IBM’s approach to service management, and the key elements of a

holistic, integrated service management solution.

Key service management challenges

As CSPs pursue new opportunities in a landscape of constant reinvention and

increasing competition, they face a paradox: building agility, innovation and

quality in an increasingly complex environment with unrelenting cost

pressure. How do they:

● Eliminate the high cost of maintaining, upgrading, and operatinginflexible legacy operational systems, and migrate to an agile,configurable environment for managing new services?

● Procure and deploy new assets such as LTE and converged IP backbonescost-effectively within an already-complex infrastructure? How do CSPsensure that these assets are deployed and configured accurately, and areoptimally maintained?


IBM’s approach to servicemanagement can help CSPsmanage diverse servicecharacteristics.

● Defend against new security risks as they move from proprietaryinfrastructures to converged IP networks and open up their Web 2.0services to both third parties and end users?

● Create end-to-end visibility across an increasingly complex service deliverychain that now integrates third-party content and services?

● Manage the explosion in data due to both new content-based services andonline storage of end-user data such as e-mails, blogs, Web pages, andphotos?

● Meet customers’ quality expectations when one poor service can affectoverall service uptake? How do they pinpoint the root cause of serviceissues as they happen? How do they understand what services customersare using, and what they are experiencing in near real time to reducechurn and create upsell?

IBM’s service management approach

Service assurance is a key component of service management, and IBM has a

strong track record of market leadership in service assurance, working in

partnership with CSPs. However, a service must be more than available and

responsive to succeed. It must have customer value, be both affordable

and profitable, and be trusted and easy to use. To drive service adoption and

create sustainable advantage, CSPs need to manage these diverse service

characteristics holistically. This is the role and promise of service

management.

IBM’s approach to service management is to deliver pragmatic, targeted

solutions built on an open, modular, consistent and integrated service

management framework. This allows CSPs to drive short-term payback with

solutions that integrate with existing processes, systems and organizations

while, at the same time, creating long-term leverage.

These solutions fall into five key focus areas, as shown in Figure 1:

● Asset management: Building an economical physical foundation forhigh-quality services.

● Configuration management: Enabling service quality via accurate assetconfiguration.


● Service assurance: Cost-effective management of service quality andcustomer experience.

● Security management: Seamless integration of services into a trustedenvironment.

● Data management: Enhancing service value by enabling rich and robustcontent.

Figure 1: The key elements of holistic service management

Asset managementCSPs face significant challenges as they deploy new infrastructure needed to

support high-bandwidth content-based services. For example:

● Planning, procurement and field engineering need to work together sothat infrastructure is procured economically, deployed cost-effectively andoptimally maintained.

● Inventory management systems need up-to-date and precise assetinformation for accurate service provisioning.

● Financial and risk management teams must track high-value assets tomeasure ROI and drive financial and regulatory reporting.


IBM asset managementcapabilities can help CSPsintegrate procurement,configuration management,maintenance workflows, inventorymanagement, and service desk.

Asset management provides consistent management across the asset lifecycle

(planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance and retirement) and from

the last mile to the data center. It links procurement, financial, inventory, and

workflow systems, providing a consistent asset view, eliminating duplication,

improving accuracy, and enabling process optimization. For example:

● It enables just-in-time procurement, allowing CAPEX to be delayed orreduced.

● Field engineering can optimize installation processes, automate stocktracking and integrate seamlessly with vendor return and repair processes.

● Combining asset management with IBM RFID technology can create aself-inventorying network, reducing effort, improving data accuracy, andcorrecting deployment errors.

While designed to integrate with incumbent systems, IBM asset management

is built on the same technology as other key components of IBM Service

Management for CSPs. Deploying these together creates significant relational

value, such as seamless handoff of asset records to configuration management,

and design and execution of asset workflows within an integrated service desk.

Configuration managementAs CSPs deploy new content-based services, they need to configure those

services and underlying infrastructure quickly and accurately. IP infrastructure

simplifies this, but extended delivery chains introduce complexities, and

existing infrastructure (for example, RANs) remains a challenge. For example,

CSPs tell IBM:

● They lack uniform ways of identifying resources across planning, fieldengineering, and operations, resulting in process, cost, and quality issues.

● There is no consistent way of sharing essential configuration data acrossoperational systems, with point-to-point integrations creating cost withoutleverage.

● The majority of service impairments are due to unplanned configurationchanges. However, they worry about the cost and achievability ofcentralized configuration management and its productivity impact.


IBM’s configuration management approach delivers pragmatic solutions to

these challenges and is built on three fundamental principles:

● Federate and reconcile data sources, rather than incurring the risk andcost of a centralized configuration data repository.

● Leverage existing configuration tools—don’t replace them.● Enable flexible management of both planned and unplanned change.

IBM is working actively today to deliver solutions based on these core

principles, including:

● Management of resource naming during infrastructure rollout, enablingprocess integration and optimization.

● Sharing of network and service models across IBM Service Managementcomponents, and providing open access to this information to othersystems.

● Correlating unplanned changes with network and service problems inorder to automate root cause detection, drive escalation, and suppresssympathetic alarms due to configuration errors.

Service assuranceIt is more important than ever that CSPs focus on the customer’s perception

of quality to drive service adoption. CSPs are looking for service assurance

solutions that span across devices, networks, services, and customers, creating

a paradigm where everything flows from the customer’s perception of quality,

moving from customer impact to root cause in a few easy steps.

At the same time, CSPs are focused on efficiency, consolidation, and

driving down legacy costs. They are then reinvesting in automated,

configurable service assurance tools designed to work together across

converging networks and organizations—without compromising on best-of-

breed capabilities.


Comprehensive service assurancecapabilities from IBM can helpCSPs improve service quality andhelp drive service adoption.

IBM offers a comprehensive and integrated set of service assurance

capabilities, battle-hardened in customer implementations around the globe.

These carrier-grade, highly scalable solutions include:

● Fault and event management: An industry-leading, highly scalable“manager of managers.”

● Performance management: Multi-vendor solutions for wireless, IP, andwireline networks.

● Systems management: Assuring the health of application and contentplatforms.

● Network discovery: Layer 1 to 3 data network discovery and wirelessnetwork discovery.

● Service quality management: Real-time and historical service quality,SLA, and customer experience management solutions.

● Service transaction monitoring: Active and passive monitoring oftransaction response.

● Service request management: Flexible and configurable next-generationworkflow and service desk capabilities, offering both superior scalabilityand ease of upgrade.

Security managementAs CSPs deliver diverse services over a converged IP infrastructure, they face

a range of security issues:

● IP networks provide a single point of attack across services, creatingrevenue risks and compromising the trust needed for initiatives such asmobile micropayments.

● Current security infrastructures for legacy networks are fragmented andare not suited to a converged IP environment.

● As services multiply, customers will adopt them only if there is unifiedaccess, and if preferences and identity are preserved across services (for example, a single wallet).


IBM data management solutionscan help CSPs deliver continuousand reliable access to ever-increasing data volumes.

IBM security management capabilities address these specific security issues:

● Security management capabilities can also be deployed stand-alone,enabling highly scalable n-tier architectures. These capabilities can beintegrated with event management, providing a common, streamlinednetwork and security operations center.

● IBM Service Management for CSPs delivers a federated access andidentity management environment for integrating both internal and third-party services into a CSP’s services portal. This approach allows CSPs totake advantage of both in-house development and branded or white-labelpartner services to drive revenues.

Data managementAs CSPs deliver rich, content-based services, they are facing an explosion in

content—not only the content that they are delivering but the content that

their customers are generating as they move their lives online. CSPs are

actively promoting storage to their customers, from baby pictures to blogs and

e-mail, driving ever-increasing data volumes. CSPs also face new regulatory

requirements to retain usage data and content, driven by fraud, forensics, and

anti-terror initiatives. CSPs tell us they are struggling to cope with this content

growth, and are seeking to establish a clear and unified data management

strategy.

IBM continues to invest heavily to help its CSP customers with their

information management challenges, both internally and through over 20 key

acquisitions since 2005. IBM has solutions that can help CSPs deliver

continuous and reliable access to information, enable secure sharing of

information, address retention requirements, and facilitate efforts to comply

with internal and regulatory requirements.


The IBM Service Management for CSPs framework enablesfederated, contextual sharing ofinformation across modular,integrated components.

IBM Service Management is an integral part of this information

management strategy, providing best-in-class data protection and retention

capabilities designed to minimize data loss risks, reduce the spiraling cost of

data management, and help ensure that data is available 24 hours a day,

7 days a week. It can help CSPs protect their data from failures and other

errors by storing backup, archive, and bare-metal restore data, as well as

compliance and disaster-recovery data in a flexible hierarchy of online and

offline storage.

The IBM Service Management for CSPs framework

IBM Service Management for CSPs consists of a modular and integrated set of

components and best practices for service management. Because it is modular,

solutions can be deployed using only the appropriate components, reducing

costs, and accelerating time to value. As it is integrated, deployed components

are reusable in other solutions and are leveraged over time into a consistent

service management framework.

At the heart of the IBM Service Management for CSPs framework,

shown in Figure 2, is a common software backplane, providing federated,

contextual sharing of information across components. Asset and configuration

management components are built from the bottom up, using this backplane

technology and allowing critical data to be shared seamlessly. The integrated

workflow engine and service desk are also based on this technology so that

workflows and problem handling are intimately linked with asset state and

configuration, increasing accuracy and improving efficiency.


Figure 2: The IBM Service Management for CSPs framework

Front-end integration is provided through a contextually linked portal where

component UIs plug in as portlets and share data, enabling a seamless and

consistent user experience, and allowing high-value solutions to be created

across components. Key components are being integrated into this portal

today, and it is poised to become the common framework across all

components.


An integral component of theIBM SPDE, IBM ServiceManagement for CommunicationsService Providers addresses the key service managementchallenges that today’s CSPs are facing.

Summary

IBM Service Management for CSPs delivers a set of pragmatic solutions to the

key service management challenges that CSPs face today as they balance the

need to deliver innovative, new services with the need to drive efficiency and

manage costs. These solutions, covering asset management, configuration

management, service assurance, security management, and data management,

build into a holistic and open framework for managing the essential service

characteristics needed for success: quality, usability, value, trust, affordability,

and profitability.

IBM Service Management for CSPs is an integral component of the

IBM Service Provider Delivery Environment (SPDE), a complete service

lifecycle framework, covering service innovation, service creation, service

execution, service integration, service management, and customer/partner

management. It is also part of a broader set of solutions designed to improve

visibility, control, and automation across the enterprise:

● Visibility to help improve service quality and customer retention: True,real-time, end-to-end visibility into the source and resolution of issues thatcompromise network performance and availability, service quality, and thecustomer experience.

● Control to help maximize return on assets and reduce risk: A cost-effective, robust, security-rich and agile foundation on which to builddelivery of next-generation services—backed by best practices.

● Automation to help streamline processes and accelerate growth:Integrations across the service management portfolio and with otherOSS/IT systems to help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and increaseresponsiveness.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Service Management for CSPs, contact your

IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/tivoli

IBM Global Financing

Additionally, IBM Global Financing can tailor financing solutions to your

specific IT needs. For more information on great rates, flexible payment plans

and loans, and asset buyback and disposal, visit: ibm.com/financing

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008

IBM Corporation Software GroupRoute 100Somers, NY 10589U.S.A.

Produced in the United States of AmericaDecember 2008All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, IBM ServiceManagement Solutions and Tivoli aretrademarks or registered trademarks ofInternational Business Machines Corporation inthe United States, other countries, or both. Ifthese and other IBM trademarked terms aremarked on their first occurrence in thisinformation with a trademark symbol (® or ™),these symbols indicate U.S. registered orcommon law trademarks owned by IBM at thetime this information was published. Suchtrademarks may also be registered or commonlaw trademarks in other countries. A current listof IBM trademarks is available on the Web at“Copyright and trademark information” atibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

Other company, product and service namesmay be trademarks or service marks of others.

References in this publication to IBM productsand services do not imply that IBM intends tomake them available in all countries in whichIBM operates.

No part of this document may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form without writtenpermission from IBM Corporation.

Product data has been reviewed for accuracyas of the date of initial publication. Product datais subject to change without notice. Anystatements regarding IBM’s future direction andintent are subject to change or withdrawalwithout notice, and represent goals andobjectives only.

THE INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THISDOCUMENT IS DISTRIBUTED “AS IS”WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSOR IMPLIED. IBM EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMSANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ORNON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products arewarranted according to the terms andconditions of the agreements (e.g.IBM Customer Agreement, Statement of LimitedWarranty, International Program LicenseAgreement, etc.) under which they are provided.

The customer is responsible for ensuringcompliance with legal requirements. It is thecustomer’s sole responsibility to obtain advice ofcompetent legal counsel as to the identificationand interpretation of any relevant laws andregulatory requirements that may affect thecustomer’s business and any actions thecustomer may need to take to comply with suchlaws. IBM does not provide legal advice orrepresent or warrant that its services orproducts will ensure that the customer is incompliance with any law or regulation.

1 Telecommunications Industry Association, TIA 2008 Telecommunications Market Review and Forecast, February 2008.www.tiaonline.org/market_intelligence/mrf

TIW14025-USEN-00

http://www.ibm.com/tivoli

http://www.ibm.com/financing

http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

http://www.tiaonline.org/market_intelligence/mrf