The video presentation you've just seen touches on the drivers behind
Customer Network Management, its concepts, benefits and the overall HP's
strategy.
I'll now summarize some of the key points and present HP's CNM Offerings
and its value proposition.
<<HARMONi-3>>
Looking at the market trends and the challenges facing the telecom
industry, there are some key strategies the telecom service providers
can adopt so as to become more competitive.
They can become more customer-focused by developing quality customer-
oriented solution
They can develop new market by moving towards globalization and
introducing new quality value-added services through the use of open
standard- based enabling technologies
They can upgrade their equipment and inventory by moving from old analog systems to new digital ones; and by introducing new technologies, such as intelligent networks
All the above will help increase productivity, decrease operating cost
and thus maximize profits
One key strategy stood up clearly and that is in the area of partnership; telecom service providers are looking towards partnering with IT vendors to deliver complementary solutions in telecommunications.
CNM is one such solution which telecom service providers are beginning
to focus at.
.PA
<<HARMONi-10>>
So, what is CNM? CNM is an emerging standard interface for the flow of customer subscribed telecom service information from the service provider to the customer's premise. It is implemented through an integrated set of management tools which provide telecom subscribers (mainly corporate subscribers) access to telecom network service information and control facilities. This is extremely useful for VPN subscribers to manage their subscribed services. Since it's apparent that telecommunications is viewed as a "strategic weapon" in today's business environment, these new approach will definitely help them better manage their businesses.
<<HARMONi-06>>
CNM facilitates the tight integration between the telecom service provider's services, commonly known as the public telecom domain and that of the customer's private networks or the private telecom domain. This provides telecom service providers an extremely useful enabler for their outsourcing business. To facilitate the implementation of CNM is a telecom integrated environment. I'll talk more about this new environment offered by HP, later in the presentation.
Telecommunications and networking are often the lifeblood of today's
businesses and top management is concerned about the need for reliable
and advanced communications. The bottom line is to run an effective
and efficient business.
Thus, corporate telecom managers face several challenges today. As
technical experts, they are under a lot of pressure to keep their
operations up and running. As business professionals, they are
expected to anticipate future requirements. Information to help them
forecast growth and utilisation is critical. They are also operating
with less people despite growth and keeping internal customers, who
are usually demanding, satisfied. Meanwhile, they must control costs
and minimise risk, while meeting these challenges.
Some typical day-to-day challenges include:
* getting minimal or no status information from the PTT regarding the
subscribed telecom services; sometimes getting too much information
which may not be comprehensible
* has no means of telling how the services are used or if they are
being used effectively
* account for how internal users should be charged for these
telecom services
* look into ways of re-configuring the services to cope with changing
business needs
** the following examples are optional **
Here are just four "war stories" of corporate telecom managers:
"A national drugstore chain audited its telecom bills and found that
it was charged for two off-premises extension trunks that belonged to
another company down the street. It turned out that this had been
going on for 15 years!"
"A large bank identified $6 Million of excess telecom charges in its
once a year audit exercise. This was due to a telco error that had
gone undetected."
"A telecom manager for an upscale retail chain receives a monthly
service and equipment record of 180 pages long for the chain's
headquarter building. It lists equipment assignments and features when
adds, moves and changes occur. However, every item is in codes and
there is no indication as to what has changed since the last report!"
"One airline company discovered that over a long period of time, it
was paying for 15 toll-numbers that were unnecessary. It could only
manage to reduce this to 3 numbers after months of negotiations."
** end **
.PA
<<HARMONi-08a : What Do Customers Really Want?>>
The telecom customers of today, want better and more accessibility to
the telecommunications network. On-line access is what they are asking
for. Accurate and intelligent telecom information is viewed as a
critical business tool in today's corporations. Thus, corporate
telecom customers are asking telcos to provide value-added services or
else they'll go elsewhere or they may even built their own private
telecom networks. The word, competition is ringing very loudly in the
minds of today's telecom service providers. More over, 80% of most
telcos annual revenue are from their corporate customers.
Perhaps one of the highest requirements from the telecom manager's
viewpoint is the ability to have an inventory of all assets including
telecom services.
For better resource management, there is also a need to be informed of
changes to the subscribed telecom services and the provision for
alternatives is highly desired.
Customers are interested to use CNM to gain more control over service
provisioning activities. They would like to track service requests
and orders on-line on a regular basis and verify the accuracy of the
requests/orders in process. That is, is what the telco providing what
they are really asking for?
Customers want to be able to track trouble when necessary, especially
during a critical outage. The ability to check on the status of
trouble-shooting activities is high on their CNM list.
.PA
<<HARMONi-08b : What Do Customers Really Want?>>
Customers have numerous suggestions for improvements in the area of
billings and are extremely interested in on-line access to current and
historical billing information. Priority features include consolidated
bills (for all subscribed services or services rendered by the telco),
custom bill formats, monthly charge breakdowns, and usage information.
Receiving relevant and prompt notification of service status or
updates allows better planning of business activities affected. This
is also high on the CNM list.
Allowing the customer to preview cost and effectiveness of new telecom
services and subsequently allowing them to configure them will be
ideal.
From the telecom service providers view point, to implement a good CNM
solution will require an open, standard-based management platform with
lots of productivity tools. This will facilitate the ease of
developing applications and will in fact lead to faster time-to-market
of the value-added telecom services.
.PA
<<HARMONi-13 : CNM - Environment & Requirements>>
In terms of the environment and specific requirements, the whole CNM
implementation should adopt an object-oriented and standard-based
platform approach. This will simplify CNM application development,
protect investment, shield all underlying and emerging technologies,
and bring CNM services faster to market. The platform therefore must
have a comprehensive set of development tools. All interfaces in
the CNM solution will as far as possible adopt the OSI standards.
The solution should allow customer to access telecom information
through text-based and graphics-based terminals ie. being able to run
the specific CNM applications service purchased from the telcos
without having to use a workstation.
At the telco premise, there is a need to integrate information of the
telco's back-end operation systems. Telcos usually have very
proprietary and/or very mature operation systems. A basic integrator
act as a front-end "convertor" of these systems converting information
required by CNM into CNM specific OSI formats. For those systems (new
ones) which support OSI, they can interface directly with the CNM
value-added network management integrator.
With regards to the data store, the telco will store all the
customers'information in the CNM value-added integrator's telecom data
store. Whether the customer premise ststion's datastore stores the
customer specific data is an implementation decision. This is usually
dependant on the network used in the CNM solution.
.PA
<<HARMONi-14 : CNM Solution Model>>
CNM is seen as a means to facilitate running a more effective and
efficient business environment. The telecom information provided
through CNM should be used by all levels of the customer organization.
From the newtork operators, who used these information to run the
day-to-day network operations of the organization to the executives,
who needs these information to help them make better business
decisions.
For example, a bank manager responsible for its ATM business, would
require telecom service information of its ATM network to help him
make decision like: do I need another ATM in the vicinity of the
present one? do I need a new ATM or do I need to get rid of the
present one, given its low usage rate? This is one simple example.
A MIS manager will also need these information to better understand
and manage its Information Technology and Telecom resources. This
will definitely give him a much complete management picture.
Given the integration of CNM information and the information from its
internal communications support systems, telecom managers and
operators will be provided with information on an end-to-end basis
without distinguishing between services provided internally and those
supplied by the telco. This will definitely increase productivity.
.PA
<<HARMONi-09>>
Lets summarize by looking at the value CNM brings to both the telecom
service provider as well as the end-customers.
Firstly, the telecom service provider will be able to provide CNM as a customer-oriented solution. He will be able to deliver quality service and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Revenue can be derived through CNM value-added services. He will be able to decrease operation cost and increase productivity, as most of the tedious tasks of entertaining, tracking, and maintaining customer requests will be reduced tremendously. All in all CNM will strengthen its competitiveness
The end-customer on the other hand will be able to have end-to-end management capability. He will be able to optimize his telecom cost, through better management and utilisation of telecom resources and costs, given the visibility and control of the subscribed telecom services that relate to the business. In fact, visibility and control of what they are paying for is a key value.
.PA
<<HARMONi-16>>
Hewlett-Packard provides a comprehensive set of easy to develop and
integrate CNM capabilities based on the HP's Open System Framework.
These capabilities include:
- the HP 9000 PA-Risc computer system and HP-UX platform
- the HP OpenView HARMONi software platform
which includes key components of the industry-leading HP OpenView
Distributed Management software
- CNM Applications delivered either through our channel partner programs
or through our Professional Service Organisation
- CNM Consulting Services and Custom Development/Integration
Services delivered through our own Professiional Services
Organizations and HP channel partners
Together these will help expedite the CNM Implementation and ensure
its success.
.PA
<<HARMONi-17>>
Let me give you a brief overview of the 1st release of the HP OpenView
HARMONi product. It consists of 3 major components:
The 1st major component is called DataWalker, a generic application
utility to ease the development of a complete service inventory
application; it also provides the essential browsing and reporting
capabilities which will help both the end-user as well as the
application developers to increase productivity; The topology
configurator provides breakthrough productivity gains by allowing
flexibility in configuring a user- defined topology or user-defined
management view or domain;
The 2nd major component are the Platform services.
The 1st set of services are the OpenView Distributed Management
