The three stages of the transformation
This can be illustrated by the three following stages:
- Stage 1 – Network assurance: Five years ago, the network was the most important. Telcos were node centric.
- Stage 2 – Service assurance: Today, telcos are service centric and the implementation of a Service Quality Management solution (SQM) is most important to them.
- Stage 3 – Customer assurance: Tomorrow, we will move to the subscriber centric stage where telcos will need to give the best customer experience. The business client segment will also weigh increasingly more with 5G deployments and they will also expect service excellence.
The crucial role of network devices and services monitoring
An important step during this shift is to evaluate how network devices and services are being monitored. This evaluation is crucial to delivering better customer experiences (cf Challenge 1).
With a constant growth of the number and complexity of services offered to customers, the impact of network performance on the quality of service will also become more complex. Therefore, it is crucial that there are service monitoring tools to identify and report network-performance issues that impact customer service.
Service monitoring tools must also be able to perform a business impact analysis in terms of lost revenue due to service degradation.
That’s the reason why there is an opportunity for new types of vendors that can help telecom companies adapt to the constraints of software network monitoring.