Apm Wily Telecommunications Brief

Optimizing Telecommunications OSS/BSS and SDP Deployments with Application Performance Management

solution brief: APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Copyright © 2007 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

For next-generation OSS/BSS applications and Service Delivery Platforms, CA Application Performance Management provides deep, real-time visibility into today’s complex next generation OSS/BSS applications and Service Delivery Platforms. With CA Wily Technology products, you are better able to manage service levels and the user experience, thereby protecting revenues, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

OverviewChallenge

As telecommunications architectures converge around IP and IT standards and become increasingly complex, operations teams need to bring their new OSS (Operations Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems) up to carrier-grade availability and performance levels. In a world where a single transaction may include voice, video, and data transmission crossing different OSS and BSS systems, how can you eliminate the firefights, finger-pointing, and customer frustration that results when a critical system is slow or unavailable?

Solution

CA Wily Technology provides the only comprehensive suite of products specifically designed for managing the performance and availability of enterprise- and network-based applications and platforms. These products are based on proven technology that monitors applications in real-time, with very low overhead, and with no code changes required. The performance information is delivered to both business and technical stakeholders through customizable, role-based dashboards and reports.

Benefits

CA Wily manages risk through improved application and service assurance, performance, and availability in converged OSS/BSS and network operations environments. It allows business organizations to measure and report on the real customer experience and SLA fulfillment. It helps to ensure the rapid and concurrent release of new applications and services, and to reduce infrastructure costs by pinpointing the potential bottlenecks and performance-related deployment issues. It allows operators to detect problems before their customers start reporting them.

CA AdvantageThe CA Application Performance Management solution can provide everything telecommunications operators need to ensure critical applications and services are meeting their performance objectives and service level agreements including live, end-to-end transaction views; proactive alerting; and on-the-fly reporting.

CA Wily Technology APM products provide the only solution that can predict and manage the end-to-end performance of IP-based transactions or business processes while providing actionable, real-time information for everyone with a stake in their performance. This is done in production environments, in real-time, on real customer transaction data, with very little overhead and with no application code changes required.

Next StepsFor more information on how CA Wily’s comprehensive products can help you achieve your operational efficiency and deliver the best service to your customers, visit us at http://www.wilytech.com/solutions/industry/telecommunication.html.

SOLUTION BRIEF: APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS 3

4 solution brief: APPliCAtion PerforMAnCe MAnAGeMent for teleCoMMuniCAtions

the next Century of telecommunications is About softwareAs voice revenues plateau, the number of new service offerings aimed at maintaining or growing average revenue per user (ArPu) continues to increase. these offerings include converged services, XoiP, tele-voting, micro-payments, and sophisticated customer self-service and provisioning, to name just a few. in the next-generation environments, operators are rolling out oss/bss applications and services that are driven by standards-based software solutions utilizing commercial off the shelf (Cots) components. services are software transactions flowing through iP-based, standards-based applications and infrastructure. technologies like J2ee, .net, siP, Jslee, soA, and web services are increasingly being used to implement new rich services and customer-facing applications. traditional systems or network management solutions do not meet the needs of today’s telecommunications applications and platforms. Managing performance and quality of service becomes a significant challenge as telcos move into the next generation, converged, software-based era.

softwAre trAnsACtions flowinG

Leading Performance Management Issues

oPtiMiZinG user-fACinG APPliCAtions the goal for customer inquiries, purchases, and support is “first contact resolution”—be it at the point-of-sale, call center or in a self-service portal. Completing transactions efficiently requires gathering information in real-time from multiple sources to create a single view of the customer, and then delivering it without delay. Any degradation in the performance or availability of the applications that must complete these functions will translate into lower productivity, decreased customer satisfaction, and in many cases, lost revenue.

figure a

in converged environments, services are software transactions flowing through iP-based, standards-based applications and infrastructure.

section 1: ChaLLenge

End User

Network Call/Session Control Function(SIP and HTTP)

Billing Applications

Customer ManagementApplications

AuthenticationWeb Server

Circuit SwitchedNetworks

IPTV

Video Conferencing

AAA Server Music Downloads

App Server(Business Logic)

Gaming

HBS


Comprehensive Visibility

• End-user experience

• Web applications

• Enterprise portals

• Application servers

• Integration middleware

• Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)

• Web services

• Supporting systems

• Individual transactions

• Memory leaks

Process Integration and Best Practices

• Real-time monitoring

• In production 24x7

• Low overhead

• Event notification

• System management framework integration

• Customizable, intuitive dashboards

Historical Reporting and Capacity Planning

• Expert services

• Professional services

• Education services

ENSURING THAT NEXT GENERATION NETWORk SOFTWARE PLATFORMS AND APPLICATIONS ARE CARRIER GRADE With the shift towards software-based Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as part of Next Generation Networks (NGNs), operators and service providers need new tools to manage the complex software platforms within the network while IT professionals need to ensure that supporting OSS/BSS can scale to meet new real-time demands. They also need to effectively manage the performance and availability of services delivered on the network by third-party providers.

OPTIMIZING OSS/BSS OSS and BSS systems need to be ready for the real-time demands of next generation networks, but they must also be ready to handle other immediate IT challenges. The rapid roll-out of new billing models and provisioning requirements combined with continued growth of subscribers puts extra pressure on existing systems. Recent moves by many operators to rationalize their OSS/BSS systems promise to reduce costs and increase flexibility, but also introduce new complexities and management risks.

ENSURING AVAILABILITY OF INFORMATION HUBS AND BUSSES Increasingly, network operators are using integration platforms, SOA and web services to support growing transaction volumes and provide greater and deeper integration. This enables OSS/BSS to effectively share information, get a single view of the customer, and create interfaces with wholesale customers, content and service providers, and internal divisions. These systems require proactive management capabilities that enable proactive detection, isolation, and elimination of transaction performance issues.

MEETING SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS Commercial relationships and regulatory demands place very strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on network operators. Failure to meet SLAs results in fines and loss of commercial opportunities. Without detailed systems monitoring and alerting, SLAs may be breached before proactive action can be taken to fix the issue.

requirements for effective Management of next generation telecommunications environments

“In the telecom vertical, the increasing use of J2EE, .NET, SOA, web services and other IT technologies in OSS/BSS and SDP environments has created a requirement for real-time visibility of performance and problems of IT applications. The strength of the CA Wily product portfolio is that it provides a comprehensive set of tools for monitoring this type of environment.”

oss observer, april 2007

Controlling risk and ensuring successCA wily technology provides the only comprehensive set of products specifically designed to ensure the delivery of high-performance applications and services. these products have proven themselves with leading management capabilities for real-time, high transaction, mission-critical applications, and infrastructure for standards-based platforms.

delivery of hiGh-PerforMAnCe APPliCAtions And serviCes

section 2: soLutIon

figure b

CA wily technology provides the only comprehensive set of products specifically designed to ensure the delivery of high-performance applications and services.

6 solution brief: APPliCAtion PerforMAnCe MAnAGeMent for teleCoMMuniCAtions

Application Performance Management

J2EE, .NET, web services, Portlets, Availability, Performance,

Failed TXs, Errors, SLAs, Always-On Recording, Transaction Tracing

Customer Experience Management

Transaction Success Rates, Failures, Errors, Defects,

Scorecards, SLAs, Six Sigma

End User

Network Call/Session Control Function(SIP and HTTP)

Billing Applications

Customer ManagementApplications

AuthenticationWeb Server

Circuit SwitchedNetworks

IPTV

Video Conferencing

AAA Server Music Downloads

Gaming

HBS

App Server(Business Logic)

Ca Wily Customer experience Manager

Ca Wily introscope®

Ca Wily Professional services

By monitoring applications across multiple tiers, the CA Wily products provide deep visibility into next generation mission-critical environments, allowing operators to track customer transactions in real-time as they are processed, from user interfaces to the edge of the network.

Customer Experience Manager (CEM) monitors every transaction in real-time, analyzing the performance and quality of web-enabled business processes. By continuously reporting on transaction success rate and response time for each user session or groups of users, CEM manages the fulfillment of SLAs and reports on their violations. It allows you to immediately respond to the online experience of each application end user, detect transaction problems as they happen, and ensure transaction integrity. CEM provides detailed analysis on the scope, severity, and business impact of the transaction—information that is essential to rapid problem solving and aligning IT action with business priorities.

Introscope enables you to proactively monitor complex applications in production environments 24x7, detect problems before they affect your customers, and quickly resolve issues so you can restore your business operations and deliver superior quality of service. Introscope’s patented, low-overhead technology can be used to manage mission-critical applications end-to-end, around the clock without degrading performance. Introscope does not require any code changes, and delivers its information through customizable, role-based dashboards and reports.

Working closely with enterprise IT teams, CA Wily’s Professional Services personnel apply their experience to help you meet performance targets and deployment schedules while significantly increasing the availability of applications in production. CA Wily Education Services offerings give IT and network teams complete knowledge of products from CA Wily Technology and industry best practices.

Ca Wily is the right Management Choice for next generation oss/bss and network architecturesCA Wily Technology provides the only comprehensive set of products and services specifically designed to provide benefits across multiple operator initiatives such as:

• RISk MANAGEMENT THROUGH IMPROVED SERVICE ASSURANCE, PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY Proactive monitoring ensures that your IT and network teams get first warning of potential issues along with the information they need to address them.

• CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT Your IT and business organizations can measure and report on real customer experiences. IT can isolate poor service to an individual or group of users, to the root cause of the problem in the network or to the exact software component.

• RAPID AND CONCURRENT RELEASE OF NEW APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES A major cause of project delays is the inability to find performance issues, resulting in the roll-back of releases from production. Greater visibility into the system means that more projects go live on time and stay highly available.

• TRANSFORMING INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS Detailed historical performance information makes it easier for your IT team to pinpoint potential bottlenecks for capacity planning, enabling the smart deployment of the right hardware and infrastructure in the right place.

• REALITY-BASED SLA DEFINITION AND MANAGEMENT Historical reporting enables SLA management and ongoing improvements to the architecture. IT teams can run SLA compliance reports on applications, individual services and operations to ensure that service level objectives are being met and if not, to understand what failed and when.


“Web applications are critical business channels for Alltel, and we see superior customer service as an important competitive differentiator. CEM helps us ensure our applications deliver world-class perfor-mance for every customer and every transaction.”

Mike henningManager of Enterprise Tools, Alltel

MULTIPLE COMPONENTS VISIBILITY

subset of systems Ca Wily Can Monitor:

• Portal solutions including BEA WebLogic,® IBM® WebSphere,® SAP® NetWeaver Portals

• Call center software including Chordiant,® Clarify (Amdocs), Siebel

• Billing including Amdocs, Convergys

• ERP, order management, and other applications from SAP based on NetWeaver

• Integration, business process management, and network adaptation software including BEA WLI, IBM WBI, BEA Aqualogic,® BEA Tuxedo,® Webmethods, Oracle® BPEL, BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper, SAP NetWeaver and ABAP

• SOA and Web Services deployed on standard platforms like those from BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft®

•SIP and application servers including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss®, Oracle Application Server and Microsoft .NET environments

???

Telephony Messaging gaming Presence Portal POS Call Center

HTTP SiP

bSS

OSS

SiP Server

app Server

Network interfaces

Mobile iP PSTN / iN

aPPLiCaTiON LaYer CuSTOMer aPPLiCaTiONS

SerViCe CONTaiNer LaYer

SOa Web SerViCeS iNTegraTiON

NeTWOrK LaYer

figure C

In order to monitor next generation environments, deep visibility into multiple components is required.

“Technology from CA Wily allows us to deploy new telecommunications services to our customers with confidence because we have real-time, proactive insight to solve any performance challenge 24x7.”

Cathy hendersonIS Development Manager, MTN

8 SOLUTION BRIEF: APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS

section 3: benefits Assuring Peak Efficiency Through Proactive ManagementCommunication Service Providers (CSPs) can achieve significant financial and qualitative benefits by proactively managing the availability and performance of their mission-critical OSS/BSS applications SDP and deployed services, and network interfaces.

CA Wily helps manage risk through improved application and service assurance, performance, and availability in converged OSS/BSS and network operations environments. This helps to ensure the rapid and concurrent release of new applications and services, and to reduce infrastructure costs by pinpointing the potential bottlenecks and performance-related deployment issues. With CA Wily products, business organizations can measure and report on the real customer experience and SLA fulfillment to individuals and groups of users. As a result, operators can detect problems before their customers start reporting them.

All top 10 Tier-1 operators in the world are CA Wily customers today. We have studied the business and IT impact that these and other CA Wily customers have achieved in three specific use case scenarios: Telecommunications Service Delivery, Customer Self-Service, and Contact Center. For more detailed information, visit www.wilytech.com/solutions/industry/telecommunication.html.

increasing the Profitability and efficiency of service Delivery In the context of service delivery, the link between performance and bottom-line results is especially pronounced:

• The ability to quickly identify and eliminate performance risks from the roll-out of new services accelerates time to revenue and the ROI of new service creation.

• Improvements in availability of mission-critical, customer-facing systems prevent customer churn and preserve the integrity of the brand, in addition to directly increasing revenue.

• Acceleration of service ordering, activation, and provisioning enhances the revenue potential of every service and avoids customer support costs.

• Ensuring that performance threats are identified and isolated before they affect service quality helps meet SLAs and protect revenue.

assuring high Quality of Customer self-service (Css) By preventing availability and performance issues from reaching the customer, operators can enjoy the full benefits of moving customer interactions to self-service channels. The financial benefits come from higher revenue through self-service channels, reduced operating costs, and more effective and efficient IT operations. High-quality self-service also drives qualitative benefits including improved customer satisfaction and retention, positive word-of-mouth, and enhancement of the company’s brand image. The broader benefits achieved through proactive monitoring and SLA management of self-service applications are:

• Understanding of customers’ actual experiences of interacting with the CSS system.

• Ability to create early-warning flags about performance threats.

• Presenting performance data in ways that are actionable for audiences ranging from web application owners to middleware groups to customer care executives.

• Ability to rapidly isolate and permanently resolve issues when they arise.

“Introscope delivers real results for Covad. In the telecommunication industry, an application outage can translate directly to lost revenue. Introscope helped us to improve application’s uptime by 3%—that’s real ROI.”

Marvin WesleyManager, Covad


enhancing Contact Center operationsCA Wily Technology helps operators achieve improvements in contact center application performance and availability that have a direct impact on almost every contact center success metric. CA Wily customers have realized significant cost savings and revenue gains from monitoring and managing their mission-critical applications with CA Wily Introscope and CA Wily Customer Experience Manager. By measuring key parameters such as screen pop times or transaction success rates against customized thresholds, operators have been able to identify and resolve performance threats before they impacted end-users. When a performance problem does occur, CA Wily customers are able to quickly isolate the source, significantly reducing the length and impact of outages and performance issues. The specific benefits from proactively using performance monitoring products in a contact center environment are:

• A more available and responsive agent desktop shortens both handle time and after-call work time—reducing average cost per contact.

• Shortened handle time provides time for additional cross-sell or up-sell initiatives.

• Better-performing agent desktop and back-end connectors also ensure that agents always have the right information and recommendations, thus reducing queues, wait times, and abandonment, while raising revenue.

• Customer Service Representative (CSR) job satisfaction rises if the tools they use empower rather than frustrate them in accomplishing their goals.

Ca Wily has helped solve Many Critical issues for telecommunications organizations World-Wide, including:

• Application failures and delayed launches caused by rapid growth of subscribers and billing system complexities.

• Self-service portal failures leading to lost pre-pay and ring tone transactions and unhappy partners.

• Process failures in which the CTO hears about application problems from customers or the line of business rather than the IT staff.

• Broken SLAs resulting in large regulatory fines.

• Slowly responding call-center screens lowering CSR productivity.

• Increased call-center load due to a malfunctioning IVR application.

• Lost or mishandled orders due to failures in an order management or provisioning systems.

• Hidden performance issues in integration projects.

• Finger-pointing between network and operations teams, outsourced developers and operations.

• Inability to measure and manage SLAs with third party content and service provider.

10 SOLUTION BRIEF: APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS

“By improving the performance of our call center CRM applications, we reduced the length of customer support calls by an average of 20 seconds. This increase in productivity has saved us the equivalent of $10 million annually.”

a tier-1 Wireless operator

section 4: Ca aDVantage All Top 10 Tier-1 Operators Worldwide Use CA Wily Application Performance Management Products TodayCA Wily Technology provides the only comprehensive products specifically designed for managing the performance and availability of enterprise- and network-based applications and platforms. These products are based on proven technology that monitors standards-based software infrastructure and applications in real-time, with low overhead and no code changes required. The performance information is delivered to both business and technical stakeholders through customizable role-based dashboards and reports.

For more information on how CA Wily’s Application Performance Management products can help you improve operational efficiency and deliver the best service to your customers, visit us at http://www.wilytech.com/solutions/industry/telecommunication.html

• Download CA Wily’s ROI and Benefits Studies for telecommunications-specific use cases based on real customer feedback: Service Delivery, Customer Self-Service, and Contact Center. Request an ROI assessment of how proactive performance monitoring and customer experience management can impact your bottom line. The assessment is delivered by the CA Wily professional services team and will result in real financial impact numbers based on your specific input.

• Read CA Wily customer case studies based on the real stories from our customers.

• Get detailed product information on all CA Wily products and services.

To find out more about other products from CA Wily Technology, email [email protected], visit www.wilytech.com, or contact one of our worldwide offices.

uS / Canada europe asia / Pacific1 888 GET WILY +44 (0) 1753 577733 +65 6337 2822 +1 650 534 9400

section 5: next stePs


Learn more about how CA Wily Technology can help you transform your business at ca.com/apm

CA, one of the world’s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT for greater business results. Our vision, tools and expertise help customers manage risk, improve service, manage costs and align their IT investments with their business needs.

CA Wily Technology is the market-leading provider of Enterprise Application Management products. By delivering end-to-end visibility into customer transactions in real time, products from CA Wily Technology enable companies to successfully manage the health and availability of their critical web applications and infrastructure. CA Wily’s collaborative management approach allows enterprises to rapidly detect and diagnose application slowdowns and failures, and better assess the impact of application performance on business success. This means better customer service, more stable revenue streams, and higher IT productivity.

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Apm Wily Telecommunications Brief

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