Report for MYCOM

Unified network performance

management: How to assess
suppliers in the market for
converged mobile services
April 2013
Patrick Kelly and Anil Rao

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 Unified network performance management: How to assess suppliers in the market for converged mobile services | i

Contents

1 Executive summary 1

2 Market drivers 1

3 Business challenges 2

4 Criteria for selecting a strategic supplier of network performance management software 3

5 Vendor capabilities 4

About the authors 5

This report was commissioned by MYCOM. Analysys Mason does not endorse any of the vendor’s
products or services.

List of figures
Figure 1: Vendor comparison matrix [Source: Analysys Mason, 2013]................................................................. 4
Figure 2: Definition of the criteria [Source: Analysys Mason, 2013] ..................................................................... 4

© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 Contents

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1 Executive summary
The convergence of network technologies and services means that communication service providers (CSPs)
must be able to support next-generation IP and video services and quickly assess the capabilities of suppliers in
the marketplace in order to reduce procurement times and time to market cycles. There are distinct advantages
for CSPs which source commercial software systems rather than developing custom systems in-house. For
example, they can:

 bring products and services to market faster

 take advantage of proven deployments and business support functions
 transfer ongoing maintenance of source code to vendors for support of new equipment and feature sets
 benefit from productised features developed based on vendors’ experience of working with similar CSPs.

Robust network performance management enables CSPs to provide quality of service assurance and improve the
customer experience. In contrast, CSPs which rely on multiple performance management systems only have a
fragmented view of their network performance, which leads to longer problem resolution times and a higher
total cost of ownership.

With networks becoming increasingly complex, CSPs must therefore consider migrating to a unified network
performance management system that offers a real-time end-to-end view of the network, encompassing multi-
technology domains (including radio, backhaul, core and IP). Such a solution enables CSPs to: better visualise
and understand the link between network issues and service impacts, reduce operational costs, and reduce churn.

This paper discusses the market drivers for investment in performance management systems, assesses the
business challenges faced by CSPs, and provides capability analysis for leading system vendors.

2 Market drivers
The market drivers for investment in a unified network performance management system are set out below.

 Mobile subscriber penetration is higher than 100% in developed markets. Most mature markets have
seen subscriber penetration exceed 100%, putting significant pressure on CSPs to pursue strategies to
differentiate themselves from their competitors. By gaining a deep understanding of their network
performance, CSPs can make informed decisions that will enable them to differentiate themselves based on
superior network quality of service.

 CSPs worldwide are going through a major technology refresh cycle, although fixed and mobile CSPs
are at different stages of their refresh. Migration of T1/E1 to Ethernet for mobile backhaul and the move to
IP in the core is almost complete, whereas the LTE migrations are now underway but the investment
requirements will continue to increase over the next three years. In the fixed market, technology migration
is being driven by NGA and FTTx investments. CSPs will need a unified network performance
management system to cover the plethora of technologies they now use.

 Growth of video services in fixed and mobile. LTE and FTTx deployments are enabling CSPs to launch
higher-bandwidth video services which will enable them to compete against over-the-top (OTT) players.
The need to monitor end-to-end quality of service for effective service assurance will drive investments in
end-to-end performance management systems.

© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 Market drivers

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 Focus on improving customer experience. The commoditisation of telecoms services demands that CSPs
acquire information on the user experience, in order to reduce customer churn and meet service level
commitments. CSPs are seeing significant value in the ability to associate network performance KPIs with
service impacts, and thus gain a better understanding of how network performance issues affect customer
experience. Customer experience management objectives will therefore drive investments in the network
performance management domain.

3 Business challenges
The complexity of today’s networks poses a significant management challenge for CSPs. However, the network
complexity is immaterial to customers, whose only concern is the quality of service when they make a call or
access data services. Customers will churn if their quality of experience fails to meet their expectations. CSPs
are therefore placing increasing emphasis on customer experience management, which is an area where a robust
network performance management system can make a significant contribution.

Most large CSPs have hundreds of systems for monitoring and reporting on network quality, and the impact this
has on subscribers of mobile data, broadband, and business services. These performance monitoring systems
have been obtained from a combination of equipment vendors and independent software suppliers, as well as
through internal ad-hoc development to support functions that are not available from a commercial software
product. CSPs struggle to connect customers with the services and the network that is delivering the service.
This has created demand for a unified network management system that is capable of providing end-to-end
performance metrics across many different technologies that can be directly tied to the customer experience of
high-value customers.

The challenge is to manage the performance of a network that includes equipment not only from various
technology generations (2G, 3G, LTE, TDM, IP) but also from different network equipment manufacturers. A
CSP’s network environment typically consists of equipment from three or more network vendors, each with
their own dedicated EMS/NMS for their equipment. Even though such EMS/NMS solutions provide
performance management capabilities, they are solely designed for each vendor’s own equipment and often do
not provide advanced capabilities (such as cross-domain correlation and guided workflows).

Even in cases where a ‘manager of managers’ is chosen to provide network performance management, this does
not necessarily provide cross-domain functionality (covering backhaul, radio, core and IP infrastructures, for
example). To counter this problem, CSPs are forced to deploy domain-specific performance management
systems, and so only have a partial view of the network rather than an end-to-end view of performance. Such
solutions lead to extended call resolution times, high costs and poor customer service, because call centre agents
have to use multiple screens to perform accurate diagnosis and often need to escalate issues to more expensive
level 2 and level 3 support personnel. Integrating the myriad of performance management systems to provide a
unified view tackles this problem to some extent, but this involves high integration costs, bespoke development
and scalability issues.

With the burden of legacy, it becomes a significant challenge for a CSP to scale up its performance management
platform as the network expands. Unless great care is taken, a CSP’s operating costs and maintenance overheads
can increase as a direct result of network expansion, due to the demand for more deployments of the
performance management system, additional truck rolls and a larger number of trouble tickets. In addition,
legacy performance management systems lack the ability to proactively flag network performance problems.
Problems that are flagged only after they have occurred risk the possibility of a service outage, dissatisfied
customers and churn. Unless CSPs appreciate the need for a proactive, real-time view of infrastructure

© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 Business challenges

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performance with clear actionable insight they will be unable to resolve issues before they have an impact on
service quality.

Although cost reduction is important, CSPs are also under pressure to innovate and launch new services quickly
in order to generate revenue. Service innovation and complex service propositions lead to the deployment of
new network elements and devices in the network. Legacy performance management systems that do not
provide out-of-the-box capability to self-certify, discover and manage the plethora of new devices and network
elements lead to protracted implementation timelines and longer time to market for new services.

4 Criteria for selecting a supplier of network performance

management software
Analysys Mason has been providing market analysis and insight into the OSS and BSS supplier market for 12
years. Based on this experience, we recommend that CSPs wishing to select a network performance
management software supplier should assess the following capabilities (in addition to the detailed responses
provided to their RFQ/RFP), to arrive at a short list of vendors.


1
Tier 1 and Tier 2 CSP deployment . Vendors should have production deployments at Tier1/2 CSPs, with
at least six references in different geographical regions, and they should provide support for a diversity of
services and technologies.

 Innovation and growth. Independent software vendors with annual revenue of USD75 million or less must
demonstrate an appropriate balance between R&D investments and profitability. R&D budgets typically
range from 2% to 18% of total revenue for software companies that sell solutions to CSPs. A good metric is
to look at the effectiveness of R&D spending and profits for the company. Smaller companies react to
changes in the market more quickly than larger suppliers. R&D should lead to innovation, but a vendor
needs to make profits which are sustainable – otherwise the risk to the CSP exceeds the benefits because of
a high likelihood of failure.

 Domain expertise of the vendor, in terms of the comprehensive skill set of its field engineers, the
proficiency of the organisation in deploying its own solutions, as well as its experience of integrating these
solutions with third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and in-house systems.

 Total cost of ownership. The vendor’s solution must be able to support a complex set of services at a much
lower cost than systems developed and maintained in-house or other COTS products with high demands on
systems integration, data migration and ongoing costs.

 Solution capabilities. A vendor needs to offer well rounded and balanced solution capabilities to support
complex services. For example, it should have the ability to support multi-domain technologies (including
radio, backhaul and core) on a single unified management platform and dashboard to provide an end-to-end
network performance view, carrier-grade scale to gather and process millions of network performance data
records, out-of-the-box capability to configure and generate new reports (as opposed to custom
development).

1
Tier 1 CSPs are categorised as having revenue of more than USD10 billion, and Tier 2 CSPs as having revenue greater
than USD1 billion but less than USD10 billion.

© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 Criteria for selecting a supplier of network performance management software
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5 Vendor capabilities

Figure 1 summarises our assessment of five vendors of performance management systems, based on an
assessment of the criteria discussed in Section 4 (and defined in Figure 2 below). The matrix contains vendors
which have all deployed a unified single umbrella performance monitoring system for supply to CSPs. The table
assumes that suppliers have deployed network performance monitoring systems in a converged mobile network
that includes radio, transmission, core and backhaul for voice, video and data services. This chart can be used as
a starting point for evaluating suppliers on the following capabilities.

Figure 1: Vendor comparison matrix [Source: Analysys Mason, 2013]

Figure 2: Definition of the criteria [Source: Analysys Mason, 2013]

Criterion Definition
Tier 1 and 2 CSP
CSPs with annual revenue of more than USD1 billion
deployment
Innovation and growth Investment in R&D; growth of company exceeds overall market; patented technology

Domain expertise
Total cost of ownership
Solution capabilities
Skillset is superior in application segment, resulting in proven business outcomes
TCO combines initial deployment cost and ongoing maintenance. A lower TCO than that of
competitors over a three-year period receives a higher rating

Carrier-grade scale Ability to monitor millions of performance metrics and analyse/report on data daily/hourly

Ad-hoc reporting
Automation of operational
tasks
Unified management
platform
Multi-vendor support
Adaptable and flexible reporting tool that can be defined by the user
Ability to take business processes and service metrics and quickly map these to software
systems
End-to-end platform providing a combined view of performance across many domains and
services
Ability to support equipment, protocols and service enablers from different suppliers

© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 Vendor capabilities

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About the authors

Patrick Kelly (Research Director) sets the direction for Analysys Mason’s Telecoms
Software research stream, which focuses on identifying the rapidly growing segments in the
telecoms software market and providing forecast and market share data by region and service
type. He has produced research on policy management, cloud computing, LTE and mobile
backhaul, IP next-generation service assurance, and customer experience management.
Patrick is a frequent speaker at industry and user group conferences. He holds a B.Sc. from
the University of Vermont, and an M.B.A. from Plymouth College.

Anil Rao (Analyst) is a member of Analysys Mason’s Telecoms Software research team, and
focuses on the Service Assurance, Infrastructure Solutions, Service Delivery Platforms and
Telecoms Software Strategies programmes. He has more than ten years’ experience in the
telecoms industry, having worked in systems integration and service delivery with major
Tier 1 mobile and fixed-line operators, and independent software vendors. Anil holds a
B.Eng. in Computer Science from the University of Mysore, and an M.B.A. from Lancaster
University Management School.

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2

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© Analysys Mason Limited 2013 About the authors