Streamlining network maintenance

For the past several years, service providers have been pressed to significantly reduce their costs of doing business. The pressure comes from their general need to improve their overall financial performance due to competitive and economic forces, and their desire to accomplish these financial improvements while investing in the next-generation technologies necessary to meet customers' demands for bandwidth and advanced services and applications.

Reducing the costs associated with network maintenance, which represents a sizeable portion of operating expenditures, is one way to help meet these goals. And as operators have become more willing to bring in third-party companies to manage various aspects of their services, the practice of outsourcing maintenance activities has found traction.

Maintenance services are distinct from managed services, however. Maintenance typically includes complex technical support services and repairing equipment problems as they occur, while managed services tends to cover the proactive 24/7 management of the network, according to Roosmarijn Cornelissen, research analyst in the European telecommunications and networking group at IDC. And while the line between the two types of services is beginning to blur, "maintenance is usually offered and delivered as a separate service from managed services," she said.

Because most networks are built and maintained by numerous vendors, service providers--led by operators in Europe and India--have found ways to establish multi-vendor maintenance strategies. Adopting a multi-vendor maintenance model is a significant move for a service provider and represents a breakthrough in an operator's business strategy, according to Camille Mendler, vice president at the Yankee Group. It means they're putting their "first toe in the water" toward a gradual acceptance of a complete managed services business approach, she said.

Multivendor maintenance strategies can be complex. The maintenance environment may involve numerous service level agreements and key performance indices, each associated with the individual vendors and products deployed. And it may employ a host of vendor-specific equipment maintenance procedures and business process management tools, among other factors, that are specific to a vendor or installation.

Vendors offering multivendor network maintenance services include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia Siemens Networks. Huawei, a Chinese upstart that is rapidly scoring global market share, is pursuing this market as well.

The solutions are not offered consistently or enthusiastically by the various competitors, however. "Most vendors struggle with the set up of multi-vendor network maintenance, as everybody wants to own the contract and nobody wants to work at the back-end," Cornelissen said.

Cornelissen noted that Ericsson and Huawei will only offer multi-vendor network maintenance when demanded to by their customers. And while a multi-vendor solution may be a practical and cost-beneficial way to take care of routine maintenance, forging such agreements does not come easy, she said.

For example, Cornelissen noted that Nokia Siemens Networks was recently awarded a multi-vendor network maintenance contract. However, the deal was achieved only "by letting the other vendors join the negotiation table, and the Spanish operator had to explain their demand for a single point of contact to the other involved vendors," she said.

Yet the benefits of the single-point-of-contact approach can be meaningful, saving 15 percent or more of a service providers maintenance costs, said Michael Rec, director of business development for multivendor maintenance at Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent, an early advocate of the single-point-of-contact model, acknowledges that it is a difficult maintenance formula to execute.

"It requires a high level of trust and information exchange to make it work," he said.

Rec advised that because of the compromises and tradeoffs involved in these arrangements, a service provider should approach the multi-vendor agreement as a consulting-like engagement--a partnership between the lead vendor and operator--not as a strict relinquishment of services to a third party.

"If they're just treating it as a transaction and sending it out as an RFP and not engaging with the delivery partner, the chances of making it work are slim," he said.

Yankee Group's Mendler said that with due diligence, service providers can find answers to any concerns they might have.

She recommends that service providers search out other companies that have implemented the best projects and learn the ropes from them. "That is the way you have to do it," Mendler said. "Get that information from the horse's mouth. There is no substitute."