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In a modern business climate, where competitiveness, cost control, complexities and return-on-investment are central to business processes, assuring the highest service levels in operations and maintenance is critical for service providers. Meeting these goals allows them to gain and retain customers while differentiating their services and guaranteeing services leading to more profitable customers.

On the other hand, enterprises are constantly trimming operational expenditure on communications services and IT infrastructure, compounded by constant worries about quality of service (QoS) offered by service providers. Enterprise CIOs are on the lookout for efficient utilization and improved performance of their internal communication systems, which contributes to the bottom-line.

SLAs and Objectives
The service level agreement (SLA), a contractual agreement, plays a key role in solidifying the relationship between service providers and enterprises. For service providers, an SLA is part of an assurance strategy that applies to network devices as well as to customer retention and billing practices. For enterprises, an SLA describes the most quantifiable means of resolving internal billing worries. The point at which these SLAs converge, describes an optimal performance management scenario, where service providers maximize the infrastructure RoI and enterprises minimize communications expenses.

Service quality management is fast becoming an area for development and implementation in these organizations. The aim of such solutions is to automate the process of implementing, measuring, computing and reporting SLAs, both in real time and historically. The need for SLAs extends across all types of services from simple leased line and voice subscriber services to complex value-added services. SLA metrics could be network uptime, throughput, mean time to repair, billing accuracy and more.

In other words, the software needs to perform the function of a neutral and trusted ‘arbiter’, with built-in ability to program the ‘arbitration rules’, which are then monitored for compliance and resolution.

In these contexts, some very important questions worth answering are:

n How do we measure an end-to-end service level?

n How do we provide instant information on service levels being complied with on a per customer basis?

n How do enterprises track through a single window service level compliance of external vendors and internal IT organizations?

Total Service Level Management
Maintaining a sophisticated end-to-end service level management requires a new approach based on an integrated operations support system (OSS). Traditional fault management systems are inappropriate for this application as they cannot process, calculate or report on service metrics. Likewise, network-based performance systems are insufficient due to the fact that customer-perceived service level metrics can be quite different from network performance metrics.

At the heart of the service-centric integrated OSS lies total service level management. This application processes and stores all the information relevant to monitoring service levels from all aspects of the service, regardless of whether the source is an IT or network infrastructure. Further, it has advanced integration capabilities to link to other applications such as order handling, CRM, trouble ticketing, billing, and workflow. The focus is on a true service view, distinct from the network infrastructure, which integrates all of this information, distributes and computes the critical service level metrics according to defined business rules. Thus, this application forms the pivotal SLA monitoring point.

Service-centric OSS
A service-centric integrated OSS would combine the SLM functionality with new network and service management solutions that handle diverse range of technologies, platforms and services. It would also include scalable applications for fault management, performance management, network configuration and activation. These applications should share, as much as possible, a common communications infrastructure for increased performance.

It should be a conscious endeavor of service providers to achieve an integrated view to monitor and manage networks, services and related SLAs. This service-centric OSS should be flexible enough to address a smaller set of requirements, with the ability to scale up as requirements multiply. The open, modular design also enables organizations to take advantage of a variety of third-party software.

John Mathew, Suresh Vaidyanathan, and Bithin Talukdar Hewlett-Packard