boldly going where no wireless carrier has gone before...
TRANSCRIPT
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Boldly going where no wireless carrier has gone before – Enterprise SLA Management for wireless carriers
TMF Long Beach, October 13th 2004
Liz AndersonDirector OSS & EngineeringAT&T Wireless Services
Kieran MoynihanChief Technology Officer WatchMark-Comnitel
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Battleground for wireless enterprise customers
GSMGPRS, EDGE
UMTS, HSDPA
CDMA1X EV-DO1X EV-DV
IDEN
Shipping/Courier Sector Financial Sector Insurance Sector Construction Sector
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What are wireless enterprise customers looking for
When selecting a wireless data provider, decision makers look for the following ;– Network Quality & Reliability (91.5%)– Coverage Area (90.5%)– Competitive pricing (88.5%)– Knowledgeable customer care reps (84.0%)The provision of SLAs is an important factor in selecting a wireless data service provider (78%)
( Decision Analyst Inc, “Wireless Data Service Level Agreement Study”, August 2003 )
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AT&T Wireless customer-centric strategy
Commenced a customer-centric strategy based on SQM/SLA managementCommercially deployed ServiceAssure™, a wireless SQM/SLA management system from WatchMark-ComnitelRolled out the business process changes to support integration around SQM/SLA management
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Enterprise SLAs – the critical business driver
AT&T Wireless identified enterprise SLAs as a key differentiator for the enterprise market and enabler to expand their current enterprise market shareTrue Enterprise SLAs represent a significant leap beyond manual-based SLAs and traditional scorecard reports which did not reflect the customer experienceImplemented a strategy to work with a small number of key enterprise customers to partner in the development of the requirements
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Key requirements – Actual Customer Experience
Enterprise SLA needed to monitor for a specific enterprise customer IMSI group– Accessibility, Retainability, Latency, Throughput, MTTRThe enterprise needs to understand the level of service quality delivered to individual users in specific geographic regions– Region– Market– Cell AreaThis granularity enables AT&T Wireless to work with its enterprise customers to focus on specific issues with users in a specific geographic area
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Key Requirements –Transforming customer care
Reducing the overall cycle time to resolve customer-impacting
problems!
Providing intelligent impact analysis of planned outages to
our enterprise customers!
Proactively identifying customer impacting problems before our enterprise customers tell us !
Increasing the effectiveness of our customer care with true visibility of what’s happening to our customers
that contact us!
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Outage Management – customer-centric management in action
Challenge : When an Enterprise Customer experiences a critical outage that severely impacts their business, they require an explanation, root cause and action plan
Network Operations Customer Care
Engineering Enterprise Account Mgr
SQM/SLA management system highlights internal SLA threshold violation providing opportunity to resolve problem before customer impactIf outage occurs, proactively notify customer of outage and associated impactCustomer care provide status to users ringing in and update on planned restoraltimeSQM/SLA management system used to drill down to the root cause of the customer-impacting problemProblem rectified and SQM/SLA management system verifies service restoral success
Customer
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Prioritising network resources
A perennial challenge for each wireless carrier has been– Which problems do we fix first ?– How I can optimise use of my engineering resource ?Service Management enables a clear prioritisation on which problems to fix first by– Customer impact
• Number of customers affected• Nature of degradation ( eg accessibility prioritised over throughput )
– Revenue impact• Usage profile for each individual service based on time of day
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SQM/SLA Vendor selection –decision criteria
Best-of-breed COTS based on industry standards– Compliance to the customer-centric work of the WSMT group
(GB 923 standards) of the TMF was an important factorWireless expertise– In-depth understanding of GSM, GPRS, EDGE and UMTSService Modelling expertise– Critical to wireless SQM/SLA managementStrong partnership approach– Wireless SQM/SLA is so new, we needed just one
carrier/vendor team to succeed together
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ServiceAssureTM Solution Context
ServiceAssureTM
SQM/SLA System
Network –LevelFault
Manager
SLA Violation Alarms
GPRSService Test
DatabaseGPRS Service Test Results
GPRS RAN EMSGPRS Access Network KPIs
GPRS Interface Probe
Data Warehouse
GPRS Service KPI’s
(Gb and Gn Probe Data)GPRS Core EMS
GPRS Core Network KPIs
OperationsPersonnel
SLAPersonnelSLA
ReportsReal-Time Monitoring &
Troubleshooting Data
Operational Reports
Customer TTSystem
Enterprise GPRS TTs
or TT metrics
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ServiceAssure™ Product Compliance
GB 917SLA Handbook
GB 923Wireless ServiceMeasurements HandbookWireless ServicesMeasurementsTeam
SLA Principles
TMF SLATeam & TheOpen GROUP
ProcessEngineering
GB921eTOM
KQI Concepts
KQI Concepts &Service Analysis Methodology
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Internal / External SLAs
62/63 35/35 1
62/63 35/35 1
5/5 5/5 0
5/5 5/5 0
1
5/5 5/5 0
10/10 10/10 0
167/178 41/45 15
167/178 41/45 15
26/26 26/26 0
26/26 26/26 0
26/26 26/26 0
26/26 26/26 0
5/51/5
9/20 4/8 15
26/26
26/26 6/6 0
06/6
End-to-End Service Tester
ABC Enterprise
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ABC
Expand national
contract to view
nationwide Latency KQI
1Drill down to
Area KQI
View historical
data for Area KQI
Root Cause Analysis
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ABC Enterprise
End-to-End Servce Tester
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KQI Model Hierarchy
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SQM/SLA deployment –technical lessons learned
The foundation work with the data sources and service modelling is critical to the entire project– This is particularly critical in achieving as close to real-time monitoringThe service modelling complexity needed to support drill-down/root cause analysis is extremely complex– End-to-end service models for large multi-vendor wireless networks are
the cornerstone of wireless SQM/SLA managementSignificant up-front dimensioning work is needed to ensure a long-term foundation for handling the large data volumes from the data sources and the QoS algorithm crunching
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SQM/SLA deployment – lessons learned
Along with the OSS deployment, significant effort was invested in evolving the business processes to a customer-centric paradigmThis involved a deeper and different type of partnering between different departmentsEarly involvement of the end-user groups was critical in shaping the overall customer-centric integration of the network ops, customer care and enterprise account management around SQM/SLA management
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SQM/SLA management requires a deep partnership for success
The technical complexity of wireless SQM/SLA management and business process impact requires a deep partnership between the carrier and vendorCombined with the TMF standards, a strong foundation is in place to evolve the customer-centric SQM/SLA management approach in line with new technologies and services
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A positive paradigm shift for the wireless industry
The introduction of enterprise SLA management as part of a broader paradigm shift of customer-centric management of wireless networks represents a strong step forward for the wireless industry– The technology is now available to manage your
wireless network based on services and customers– Customer-centric management of your wireless
business represents the optimum strategy to deliver consistent service quality and customer care to your customers in a profitable manner