VoIP Telephony Management

The Nextgen 8100-IPT service provides proactive, 24x7 remote management and support services for enterprises deploying converged technologies to transport voice, video and data. NEXTGEN significantly increases IT’s visibility into the performance and availability of the Cisco CallManager-centric IP Telephony environment through in-depth monitoring of Cisco CallManager and Unity applications, processes, signaling, and connection services. If a potential or actual problem is detected with any component, application or service, the alerts are correlated to isolate the fault and notify the appropriate IT staff / service provider to take actions.

We understand that a customer’s need for, and propensity to buy, out-tasked IP Telephony management services varies according to several considerations including:

• IT’s role relative to business objectives
• IT spending constraints
• In-house skills and resource gaps
• Criticality of business applications supported by the server infrastructure
• Complexity and health of the network

NEXTGEN IP Telephony services offer flexibility of choice to best align NEXTGEN’s out-tasked expertise with the customer’s in-house capabilities and resources, while reducing the overall cost of IT operations.

NEXTGEN IP Telephony Service Value Tiering

Drivers

The business case for the management of IP telephony networks comes down to its ability to make the IPT network available 99.999% of the time and to maximize the quality of the call.

Need to Reduce IT Spending
The financial benefits of effective IPT management also include reduced maintenance cost and improvement in overall health and performance of the IPT implementation.

Need for Process Automation and Discipline
The best way to deal with problems is to avoid them altogether. It is clearly more efficient and cost-effective to proactively maintain the quality of the IPT network than it is to react, isolate and fix problems. When problems do occur, resolving them efficiently with minimal or no downtime depends on the quality of the processes used to detect, respond to and resolve network problems and the level of automation and discipline embedded in the management solution.

Lack of Skills and Expertise
An in-house 24x7 management operation requires a minimum of seven or eight trained analysts and support specialists working in teams around the clock. Finding, training and retaining this staff is difficult, as is the challenge of keeping up with continuous changes in technology.

Cost of Poor IPT Reliability
The impact of IPT downtime is a multi-faceted issue not confined merely to financial cost. It is also tied to the extent to which the enterprise relies on the IP phones to conduct its business and facilitate transactions:

Revenue Loss – a recent TeleChoice study found the loss of revenue per employee, per hour can be more than $40. An enterprise with 5000 employees, whose phone system is down for approximately 30 minutes, could lose upward of $100K worth of business.
Productivity – number of employees affected, times the duration of downtime, times the burdened hourly rate.
Financial Performance – revenue recognition, cash flow, payment guarantees, credit rating, stock price
Damaged Reputation – among customers, suppliers, financial markets, banks, business partners.

Planning and Optimization
A key benefit of effective IP telephony management is its ability to easily accommodate new users and applications, while maintaining call quality and availability.

WHY NEXTGEN?

Full MSP Offering
Combined with NEXTGEN’s network, security, server and application management services, our IPT management services provides a valuable view into the performance, health and security of the entire IT infrastructure. Full coverage across the entire IT infrastructure means NEXTGEN can be the single-point-of-contact for all out-tasked operations and can provide greater efficiencies and communications between IT departments resulting in reduced operations costs.

Service Integration
NEXTGEN provides integration of OSS, service delivery and service management as well as integration of analysis and reporting across all components of a customer’s IT infrastructure including, WAN, LAN, security, servers and IP telephony.

Process Automation
NEXTGEN’s Enterprise Operations Center (EOC) is staffed with network, systems and security experts who monitor and protect the customer’s IT infrastructure on a 24x7 basis. ISO 9002 processes and procedures ensure rapid response to, and resolution of network incidents.

webCenter™
Our interactive customer portal provides the customer with a real-time view of the health, performance and security of their network environment in a centralized management dashboard.

Rapid Deployment and Low Predictable Cost
Customers can acquire a fully operational out-tasked IP Telephony management solution that complements internal IT resources for an affordable and predictable monthly fee. NEXTGEN’s New Customer Introduction (NCI) process ensures the rapid implementation of the solution.

Operations Efficiency / NEXTGEN Metrics of Excellence

• Automated problem detection and ticket generation – less than 2% of tickets are generated by customer phone calls
• Mean Time to Action (MTTA) less than 2 minutes across all customers under management
• Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) less than 60 minutes for all network and security events across all severity levels
• 82% of problems resolved without dispatch
• 41% reduction in average failures per device

Accelerated ROI

NEXTGEN’s Metrics of Excellence contribute to an accelerated ROI through:

• Minimized impact of network incidents
• Maximum availability of the IT infrastructure and e-business applications that depend on it.
• Capital cost avoidance and reduction in IT spending, including operational and physical maintenance.

Service feature set
Component	Description
Monitoring	Hardware and circuit availability and failures		•	•	•
	Interface and system status and reset monitoring		•	•	•
	Server CPU Utilization and Threshold		•	•	•
	Application process monitoring		•	•	•
Performance	Server memory, disk & CPU utilization reporting		•	•	•
	Memory & CPU utilization by application		•	•	•
	Call performance including jitter & latency		•	•	•
	Performance analysis & recommendations			•	•
Problem	Problem notification	•	•	•	•
	Problem escalation			•	•
	Application level isolation, diagnosis and problem resolution			•	•
	Real-time access to problem tickets via webCenter™			•	•
Configuration	Maintain a database of asset inventory			•	•
	Server backup completion monitoring			•	•
	Dial plan & phone pool management			•	•
	Recommend upgrades, patches, and config				•
Change	Implement pre-designed technical change			•	•
	User moves, adds & changes			•	•
	Application & operating system patches & administration			•	•
	Design & implement technical change				•

This table provides a helpful high-level snapshot of service features by category and by specific service offering.

• Monitoring - Monitoring is the process associated with detecting outages and performance degradations across all IPT network manageable elements.
• Performance - Performance Management is the continuous acquisition of element performance data, statistical trend analysis and generation of a suite of detailed, aggregated, and custom reports for capacity planning purposes.
• Problem - Problem Management is the process associated with end-to-end detection, reporting, isolation and resolution of problems or faults.
• Configuration - Configuration Management is the discipline of maintaining the device asset inventory database, the operational configuration of the managed elements and the configuration of the EOC management tools.
• Change - Change Management is the process associated with the control and coordination of ongoing changes in network/device topology and system configuration. This includes automated OSS supported workflow to ensure accuracy at all phases.

NEXTGEN IT OUT-TASKING SERVICES

NEXTGEN delivers 24x7 remote management, or IT operations out-tasking, of the following components of enterprise IT infrastructures:

Nextgen 5000 Network Management
Includes WAN, LAN, VPN, VLAN, wireless and optical networks.

Nextgen 6000 Security Management
Includes monitoring and performance of firewalls, network IDS, host IDS, VPN, security information management, and incident response.

Nextgen 7000 Server Management
Includes UNIX, Windows/Intel and Novell platforms.

Nextgen 8000 Application Management
Includes Cisco based IP telephony Call Managers, Unity Servers, and related infrastructure.

ABOUT NEXTGEN webCenter™

NEXTGEN webCenter™ is a secure, real-time web interface that allows the customer to:

• Access comprehensive daily, weekly, monthly and historical performance reports
• Obtain inventory information including device and operating configurations*
• Request detailed problem ticket information related to IPT failures and outages and obtain a variety of summary reports for all activities related to the resolution of IPT problems
• Monitor key high-level parameters against service level targets to facilitate the management of all service providers and to ensure that the IPT environment is operating within pre-established performance objectives.

* The NUVO logo is a registered trademark of NUVO Network Management, Inc. All other registered trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. These service descriptions are based on service levels at the time of printing and are subject to change without notice. Service delivery may be limited by capabilities and configuration of the customer technology. © NUVO Network Management, Inc. 2004.