Eirteic Delivering Service Assurance to Digicel

In an ongoing programme to enhance its service delivery capabilities, total communications and entertainment provider, Digicel, has selected independent service assurance provider Eirteic to design and deliver a unified Service Assurance platform across its business in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific.

The continuing increase in mobile users is making network performance a critical priority for customer satisfaction. Users are also consuming ever greater amounts of bandwidth to handle the over-the-top content such as YouTube and Netflix. “These pressures are driving a fundamental change in how operators are providing services” says Eirteic’s CEO, Patrick Buttimer. “There needs to be agility and optimisation to make sure that services are assured at every network level.”

After reviewing its overall network operations centre (NOC) and supporting IT systems architecture, Digicel determined that consolidating its legacy network monitoring tools and developing a service-centric focus would deliver quality improvements, OPEX reductions and improve operational efficiencies.

“Digicel has a strong and clear vision of what is possible with the right approach. Our solution will help to deliver cost effective, flexible and reliable communication services across any device” says Buttimer.

The consolidation of multiple event sources into a single platform and tight integration with multiple Remedy ticketing systems are just two of the requirements of the service assurance solution to be delivered by Eirteic. Unifying these systems creates a ‘manager of managers’ simplifies the network to dramatically reduce cost, speed up issue identification and response times as well as simplifying overall network management.

OSS Transformation in 2 Days?

I had heard the word ‘Hackathon’ but, at the start of January, I’d never seen one. I definitely hadn’t expected to be involved in one in my working life in the telecoms industry.  But, as it turned out, a Hackathon was exactly what we needed to fast track new ways of working for Zen Internet. Of course, we didn’t deliver OSS transformation in two days, but we did prove how OSS transformation can be achieved, and just how far reaching it will be within their business.

Zen Internet are an award-winning, UK-based, quad-play ISP with home and business users. Zen Internet focus upon customer satisfaction and, as I write this post, they have been awarded another plaudit (this time from Which? magazine) placing them first for customer satisfaction across the UK.  Our journey with Zen Internet began when we were invited to consider how they could upgrade inventory systems to support their futuristic ‘Plexus project’ – a long term transformation program. With 75% of its customer base now ON NET, Zen understands that the transforming their business needs to focus on involves more than just the network.

The big questions are;

• How can Zen Internet monitor network performance and service?
• How does Zen Internet give its customers a view of the services they are buying?

Zen Internet know that a change of approach is needed in how services are delivered, and our team set out to demonstrate just what that would look like. During the hackathon, we showcased the capabilities of a transformed OSS using mixed technologies, carefully integrated, including ServiceNow IT service management, AssureNow monitoring, and FNT command for network resource inventory. The overall objective of the hackathon was to show that an OSS transformation can be delivered quickly and easily (in theory). The use cases included:

• Creation of a new service using Zen’s Business Process Management tool, populating inventory data via FNT Command
• Reconciling Inventory Data in FNT Command as CI’s within a ServiceNow CMDB
• Creating of Incident/Trouble Tickets between AssureNow & ServiceNow
• Creating a central dashboard showing data from various systems including CRM, CMDB, Network Performance and Trouble Tickets
• Facilities Management – Mapping of buildings, room booking systems, catering bookings, etc.

It may have seemed like a tall order but, with a strong team of technical individuals, in just two days we were successful in proving every use case!! Proving, in other words, the reality of closed loop OSS architecture. Luckily for our customers, Eirteic have the ability to be as flexible and agile as needed to deliver such a solution!

I am now very interested in seeing the success that Zen Internet and Eirteic can deliver during the full Plexus OSS Transformation project.

Eirteic Enables Manx Telecom to Transform its Mobile-User Experience Through Wireless Performance Management

Eirteic partnered with Manx to provide an end-to-end mobile service assurance platform through the implementation of AssureNow and Galileo Vision. Eirteic configured AssureNow to collect all faults and vital radio access stats including 2G, 3G and 4G cell level, packet switch core and mobile switching metrics from the element managers and directly from devices.

Since 2000, Eirteic specialises in providing service assurance solutions. Eirteic provides its clients with solutions that enable them to monitor the quality of critical services across their entire infrastructure. This enables their clients to significantly reduce operational costs through lower total cost of ownership solutions. Galileo Software is the software development arm of the Eirteic Group. The Galileo Vision solution is a Visual Analytics solution that enables users to correlate infrastructure and service issues. The product is highly configurable and can visualise thousands of objects of differing types. Galileo Vision is at home both in the Network and Service Operations centres of telecommunications and large enterprises but equally in the control centres of emerging smart cities.

Today, Manx Telecom runs the bulk of the Isle of Man communications services. Manx Telecom is also the only provider to operate multiple Tier 3 Data Centres and to deliver 24x7x365 on-island technical Network Operations Centre and Business Helpdesk to support over 7,500 businesses. You don’t last 125 years without being able to evolve with the times and recognise opportunities to improve when you see them.

Therefore, it is no surprise that Manx Telecom has teamed up with Eirteic. Due to its continuing record of innovation, it operates a complex and diverse network including wireline telephony services and the latest 4G wireless services. Before the partnership, Manx’s operations team had a high number of element management systems and disparate views from their systems. This amalgamation of content and data resulted in a lack of visibility of an end-to-end service management capability. And due to the rising growth in mobile demand, Manx needed to simultaneously build and deploy new technologies while still managing its existing services. A key challenge for the company was the incapability to process all the metric data being produced by the network.

As a result, it was essential for Manx to view relevant performance statistics across their Radio Access, Mobile Switching and Packet Switched Core Networks. The Huawei M2000 network element manager provided some of this functionality. However, Manx needed to present statistics on a single platform viewable by all levels of support and management. These challenges were met with AssureNow and Galileo Vision.

Through the implementation of AssureNow and Galileo Vision, Eirteic provided Manx with an end-to-end mobile service assurance platform. Eirteic configured AssureNow to collect all faults and vital radio access stats including 2G, 3G and 4G cell level, packet switch core and mobile switching metrics from the element managers and directly from devices. This solution enabled Manx to unify and simplify the data into a single view. AssureNow’s proactive alerting enabled Manx to identify systemic issues in the mobile environment before they impacted their services and users.

The key to great service views is the availability of data from all network resources being presented through easy to use reports and dashboards. AssureNow dashboards gave Manx a unified high-level view of their mobile network, whilst still enabling a user to drill-drown to specific faults or metrics.

This solution allowed Manx to improve its mobile-user experience by highlighting the existence of and assisting in investigating the root cause of potential service outages and degradations. Fault and performance data was unified into a single mobile service assurance solution. The solution presented administrators with a simplified, real-time view of service quality indicators. This enabled proactive problem resolution and prevention, even in complex, cross-domain scenarios.

This adoption of a multi-technology, multi-vendor solution from AssureNow has enabled Manx to optimise TCO and reduce Opex through the consolidation of OSS tools whilst refocusing users and staff.

To learn more about the Manx Telecom and Eirteic partnership, download the case study here.

Eirteic Selected to Deliver MBNL Service Assurance Project

• MBNL engages Eirteic service assurance expertise for a project to reduce service implementation times, avoid high cost delivery changes, and improve fault identification and repair times.

Cork & London 15th May 2016: MBNL, the UK joint venture between mobile operators EE and Three UK, has selected independent service assurance provider, Eirteic to design and deliver a unified service assurance platform across MBNL’s business.

“Being a trusted and credible partner to two of the UK’s most recognisable and innovative mobile operators, means service interruptions are not an option,” says Patrick Buttimer, CEO at Eirteic. “This project is a major strategic undertaking to help meet MBNL’s goals of reducing service implementation times, avoiding high cost delivery changes, and improving fault identification and repair times.”

The project will focus on event and topology management, and dashboards, providing MBNL staff with top-down views of service performance, enabling them to automate and prioritise service issue resolution based on real-time customer analytics. To achieve this, Eirteic’s technical solution will include the AssureNow V4 full fault management platform from Monolith Software, and the GeoMaps element from Galileo Vision, a customer experience visualisation platform developed by Eirteic.

To ensure the project is successfully adopted throughout MBNL’s business, Eirteic will also provide consultancy on communications adoption and learning to bring together people, tools and processes. Eirteic will begin a nine-month delivery programme, which expects to deliver a return on investment within 18 months.

Mike Hooper, Business Development director, Eirteic, comments; “Mobile operators need to be able to support greater amounts of bandwidth in order to handle the amount of over-the-top content, such as YouTube and Netflix that consumers are consuming as well as social media sharing platforms like Meerkat and Periscope. More and more video and music content is getting streamed to, and shared on, mobile devices. That’s driving a fundamental change in how operators are providing services. There needs to be agility and optimisation at the network level to make sure the services are assured at every network level.”

Eirteic works with global service providers to deliver unified OSS architecture that not only manages legacy issues, but is future-proofed for 21st Century innovation.

Eirteic helps global financial services company reduce incident resolution time by 60%

• Following implementation of unified service assurance platform, AssureNow, financial services company achieves a single view of its IT infrastructure, saving time and money.

Cork & London 01 June 2016: Award-winning independent service assurance consultancy Eirteic today announced it has successfully completed a unified service assurance project for a leading global provider of financial information services, helping it achieve a 60 per cent reduction in incident resolution time.

The finance company provides products that enhance transparency, reduce risk and improve operational efficiency for banks, insurance companies, fund and asset managers, regulators and auditors. Its reputation, revenue and customer investments rely accurate and timely information and analysis. Any information errors or latency across the network could potentially impact financial decisions and investments.

The financial services company wanted to reduce cost and complexity of its IT infrastructure and simplify the management of its network to ensure accurate and timely financial information could be provided to its customers. Eirteic implemented the AssureNow™unified service assurance solution from Monolith, and consolidated six disparate system monitors to provide a single point of view of the entire infrastructure. This meant that the company could more quickly identify, and even predetermine network issues or service degradation, and so speed up reaction times to problems by 60 per cent. Since the implementation, the financial company has been able to further scale AssureNow to cover more systems and devices without performance issues or interruption.

Patrick Buttimer, CEO at Eirteic comments; “IT complexity is all too common within financial and enterprise organisations. Unifying systems to create a ‘manager of managers’ simplifies the network to dramatically reduce cost, speed up issue identification and response times as well as simplify overall network management.”