4net ESP differentiators
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Table of Contents
1.0 Key Objective – Increase Customer Profitability 3 2.0 What’s Important to Customers 3
3.0 Fundamental Advantages 4
3.1 Clear focus on Application Management 4 3.2 Simplicity – to deploy, use and maintain 4
3.3 Highly responsive to market needs 4
4.0 Underlying Framework 5
4.1 A best-practice framework 5
4.2 CMDB – the cornerstone of ITIL and 4net ESP 5 4.3 Standardised, open development environment 5 4.4 Making integration with other applications easy 6
5.0 Technological Innovation 6
5.1 Acting on what really matters 6
5.2 Leveraging intelligent data gathering 7
5.3 Visibility 7
5.4 Further innovation 8
1.0 Key Objective – Increase Customer Profitability
4net ESP is squarely aimed at helping customers make and save money over the short, medium and long term. It does this by delivering contextually relevant UC service management information, both real-time and historical, about the things that matter to the people who need to know about it. This is quite different from traditional infrastructure management applications that are typically designed to enable engineers to reactively manage infrastructure events after the occasion.
We have had the advantage of building a scalable UC service management application suite that will confidently take our partners and customers into the future on a robust, extensible and recognised architecture.
Planning - Configuration - Design - Asset Management - Simulation Troubleshooting - Alerts - Drill-down - Root-causes analysis - Auto problem resolution
Operations
- Dropped calls
- Packet loss, jitter, latency, MOS
- BW utilisation - QOS data
- Policy based management
Interpretation/Reports
- Business impact of outage - Application layer reporting - Visibility of traffic
- Analysis of call traffic
Integrates standards based user friendly GUI
2.0 What’s Important to Customers
Nemertes, a reputable research organisation, built the following framework based on comments and input from hundreds of IT executives and managers in response to what they wanted from UC Service Management. The most important issues for IT executives when selecting a UC Service Management toolset include: – Has the Service Management tool been developed using a modern and flexible development architecture?
– How easily can I make data available to other applications?
– Does the UC Management toolset conform to globally accepted IT service management practices and processes?
– Can I gain visibility of application performance and the end user experience?
– Will the UC Management product deliver information that helps me understand the impact to my business?
– These are some of the key questions that should be considered when evaluating investment in UC service management toolsets – and these are also many of the factors upon which 4net ESP is built.
3.0 Fundamental Advantages
3.1
Clear focus on Application Management
Rather than just being an infrastructure management platform, 4net ESP has been built to reach far higher into the ISO stack. This provides far deeper and broader visibility of the communication applications being supported along with the quality of the end user experience. While certainly supporting standard SNMP monitoring, 4net ESP also offers customers with a high penetration of Avaya Aura applications a previously unattainable depth and breadth of application capacity and configuration reporting.
In addition 4net ESP also provides published APIs that enable software developers to include proactive management within third-party applications. A good example includes the inclusion of 4net ESP connectivity in
business-critical IVR applications, as opposed to simply monitoring the IVR infrastructure.s
This provides the customer with visibility of (and ability to proactively act upon) those things that are either creating unnecessary expenditure or are hindering business growth.
3.2 Simplicity
– to deploy, use and maintain
The 4net ESP interface and the associated reporting formats are designed to be simple to use and simple to interpret – thereby avoiding unnecessary complexity and clutter. The aim is always to provide the right information in the most contextually relevant format to the people of need it.
Deployment of 4net ESP is also very straightforward. It is not unusual for a site to be deployed and operational within one-to-two hours, including installation of the appliance. This is in contrast to traditional enterprise infrastructure management platforms that require dedicated server components, software and considerable installation overhead.
The mechanism by which enhancements are applied to 4net ESP is seamless to the 4net ESP customer base. Being a cloud-based service, 4net ESP provides all clients with immediate access to new enhancements are soon as they are deployed.
There is little argument that faster-to-market means faster delivery of customer benefit.
3.3
Highly responsive to market needs
4net ESP’s standards-based architecture and ITIL framework, coupled with the pedigree of innovation demonstrated by the 4net ESP development team, means that 4net ESP enhancements are applied quickly and securely, aligned with ITIL best practice.
The combination of software developer and systems integrator uniquely positions 4net to deliver 4net ESP for the real needs the market. Because 4net operates as a service practitioner, it understands the needs of its partners and customers from a go-to-market, sales and technical
perspective. 4net ESP is delivered through a select group of partners in each region, as opposed to being made available to the whole partner community.
4.0 Underlying Framework
4.1
A best-practice framework
4net ESP is built from the ground up on a globally recognised best-practice service management framework – ITIL. This means that the service is well aligned with the service management requirements of most large enterprise and government organisations, where ITIL is commonly adopted as a mandatory service management framework.
Use of the ITIL framework results in well-proven customer benefits - enhanced focus and a proactive approach to service provision, better managed infrastructure and control, and more meaningful management information to support decisions, to name just a few.
4.2
CMDB – the cornerstone of ITIL and 4net ESP
With 4net ESP being built on an ITIL best-practice framework, the cornerstone of the service is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Quite simply, if a service management application does not have a formal CMDB, then it does not support an ITIL framework.
This also enables a more open approach to data sharing, as shown by the ease with which data can be extracted from 4net ESP (again quite different from less structured systems).
The 4net ESP CMDB auto-populates and continually updates itself, meaning very little on-boarding and maintenance effort. 4net ESP automatically captures a range of detail from software, hardware and firmware details all the way through to serial number, MAC addresses and physical location. This level of detail requires the execution of over 40 different command types, some of which are nested up to 5 layers deep. A formal CMDB enables a far greater ability to deliver information in the right context and configuration reports are richer and more extensible, as opposed to a less-recognised database facility – again supporting better informed decision making for the customer.
4.3
Standardised, open development environment
4net ESP’s development environment reflects the standardised, modern foundation of its architecture. 4net ESP uses a .Net framework as its underlying development platform, and HTML5 for structuring and presenting content to users via browser access. The benefit to 4net ESP customers is seen in the speed and quality by which enhancements to the service are made – often in direct response to customer feedback.
4.4
Making integration with other applications easy
Exporting information out of 4net ESP and into other applications is extremely simple. Options include point and click export via .csv, Excel and PDF. The customer can therefore access all of their information held within the 4net ESP database, not just pre-determined reports in PDF format with no access to the raw data so commonly seen in other applications.
4net ESP also provides a Web Service API to enable integration with third-party NOC management and ticketing applications such as Remedy, EM7 and others. This is a key differentiator and recognises that many customers have an overriding business management suite that takes inputs from multiple sources – including service management and network management platforms.
This means that the customer can better leverage their existing investment in business management systems.
5.0 Technological Innovation
4net ESP unashamedly addresses the expectations of the Google-era customer by providing access to data anytime, from anywhere and on any device.
5.1
Acting on what really matters
Infrastructure management applications will typically notify people on events after they have occurred – and usually it’s a case of “one size fits all”. 4net ESP takes a totally different approach, leveraging data from a diverse range of sources to enable the creation of highly tailored Availability Management offers, using Thresholds and Workflows. Notifications can be delivered via API into a ticketing system, via email, interactive SMS or twitter feed.
This means the customer can determine the scenarios that are truly important to their business, rather than relying on a “catch-all” or worse, “catch-none”. The customer can choose the means of delivery of that notification to their preferred device. Machines can’t (and shouldn’t) decide everything, so at times the notification will request a human decision by prompting then awaiting a response. Flexibility is a key 4net ESP attribute.
4net ESP’s Avaya support is augmented by a multitude of other information sources, including Syslog, Events log and Alarm log. This avoids the single dimensional SNMP-based alerting approach often seen in traditional
management platforms, and gives 4net ESP unparalleled depth and visibility into the Avaya application environment. In fact, over 80% of the incidents picked up by 4net ESP are sourced from non-SNMP events.
5.2. Leveraging intelligent data gathering
Many traditional management systems take a “once-over-lightly” approach to collecting data from the systems being managed. This means that the information presented is somewhat shallow, with multiple individual reports having to be run to produce a complete, intelligent view (this especially applies to capacity management).
4net ESP has been built from day one using an iterative, “nested” command approach, whereby information from one command feeds into the next. This enables automated production of contextually relevant report information, rather than generic “pre-run” single commands – so that customers gain an immediate view of vital information.
This intelligent approach to data mining can be seen in the small processor occupancy footprint generated by 4net ESP, an area often overlooked by less experienced development houses. The benefit to the customer is a reduced impact on business-as-usual operation
.
5.3 Visibility
As outlined earlier in this document, 4net ESP delivers contextually relevant UC service management information, both real-time and historical, about the things that matter to the people that need to know about it.
A great example is 4net ESP Capacity Manager. This service provides a deep and continual view of critical application and asset performance across the UC environment – but also enables the customer and the partner to take proactive actions as and when needed. 4net ESP enables this via Thresholds which can be pre-set according to the parameters that the customer deems important.
This again demonstrates the advantage of an ITIL-based framework, whereby multiple services (in this case Capacity Manager acting in concert with Availability Manager) can take actions and inform the right people at the right time about things that really matter.
5.4. Further innovation
The team at 4net ESP is always innovating. Our partners and customers benefit from this innovation every day. Examples of such innovation include the recently released Voice Quality Management suite, aimed at providing contextually relevant, simple, uncluttered access to the VoIP performance information that really matters.
Similarly the 4net ESP team is now working on delivery of a range of 4net ESP capability on multiple smartphone platforms, with the needs of a UK-based client driving the initial production of this capability.
4net ESP has been created as an “any-vendor” UC service management suite. A good example is the pending inclusion of support for Microsoft Lync. Recognising the fact that the customers are choosing from a range of UC applications, including traditional voice, new forms of video, plus new presence applications, the 4net ESP team has created the service to easily adapt for a wide variety of UC technologies.
Support for Microsoft Lync is underway and will shortly be available for release into the market. This will not only be delivered at an infrastructure layer, but rather the very same ITIL services, workflow engine and threshold facilities will apply across all technology sets.
Every week the 4net ESP team introduces new capability into the service – capability that is made possible by the fundamental architecture choices behind the service.
These fundamental architecture choices – modern software development environment, cloud-based service, best-practice framework and open interface philosophy, means that the 4net ESP customer base is able to (and does);
– Have direct feedback into the development road-map of the services
– Gain benefits from rapid market launch of new service enhancements
– Share in the collective input of the broader customer ecosystem.
6.0 Summary
It is worth reiterating that 4net ESP is squarely aimed at helping customers make and save money over the short, medium and long term. It does this by delivering contextually relevant UC service management information, both real-time and historical, about the things that matter to the people who need to know about it.
As outlined throughout this document, there are a number of evident and recurring reasons for 4net ESP’s unique positioning in a very demanding market;
– Simplicity – Flexibility – Innovation
