On challenges and opportunities

Entire service provider community is facing challenges posed by an unprecedented growth in subscribers, traffic volumes, inability to maintain the QoS. Planned MNP (mobile number portability) will add more challenges to service providers to retain the customer base. Voice call is becoming cheaper day by day. Operators need to look into VAS for generating additional revenues to offset the drop in voice revenue. Service providers are challenged to reduce costs and increase revenue while simultaneously attracting and retaining profitable customers.

On complexities

Operators need to focus more on service and customer centric management from the present network management perspective. Service being up and running to a satisfactory level alone will fetch revenue. A service provider's assurance strategy relies on data feeds from multiple sources. Traditional network assurance, where network operations personnel use network-element data feeds to manage faults and performance, has been the primary focus for service providers.

Agilent's assureME solutions address this market shift by managing the network, services, and the customer experience.

On key factors for success of OSS/BSS vendors

The challenges faced by service providers to reduce costs, increase revenue and attract and retain customers can best be met by streamlining operations systems and customer support processes, bringing new services to market quickly and delivering consistently high standards of service quality. To become efficient and profitable, organizations need simplified, automated, modular and flexible assurance solutions to drive down costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Price, local support base, and understanding the market dynamism are some factors that are critical as well.

On product range

Agilent Technologies' assureME solutions deliver The Power of 3. Agilent designs assureME solutions to prevent complex problems in modern multi-service environments from disrupting high service quality and to help carriers retain and attract customers. The solutions deliver service assurance across three key process areas-monitoring, troubleshooting, and intelligence-and correlate actual customer experience with network performance in real time.

Commanding the number one position in the wireless and IP assurance marketplace, Agilent's mission-critical solutions have been deployed by the majority of the world's largest telecommunications service providers. The assureME portfolio of innovative solutions addresses critical pain points shared by engineering, marketing, customer care, and network and service management
operations.