Growing the business while simplifying network operations and maintaining service levels are top challenges for customers running critical and complex enterprise and service provider networks.
Consistent availability is one issue that makes this a challenge, because your customers are sensitive to performance fluctuations and any impacts to digital experience for end users. While avoiding outages remains key, network delays and latency are productivity killers in their own right. You could say: “slow is the new down.”
Many organizations are turning to higher degrees of automation to manage complexity and increasing costs. That’s good, but contextual insight of your owned network from service-centric assurance is critical if you want to move toward autonomous, zero-trouble networks.
Managing the requirements of high quality of service (QoS) requires real-time and accurate visibility across every connected element that impacts user experience, including:
- An understanding of the real-time end-to-end service performance and service-level agreements (SLAs)
- Ability to detect the hidden and transient issues that impact service performance and then take correct actions—including automated remediation—to continuously optimize quality of experience
- Proactive, rather than reactive, operations, leveraging AI-native predictive analytics to prevent issues from happening before end users might be impacted
At Cisco Live, we introduced Digital Experience Assurance (DXA) for Cisco Networking Cloud, powered by Cisco ThousandEyes. This is a significant expansion of our strategy and capabilities, shifting network operations from monitoring to proactive, automated actions, with AI-native innovations that ensure assurance across both owned and unowned network domains.
Today, I’m thrilled to also unveil Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Accedian Skylight, acquired by Cisco in September 2023). This solution gives organizations microsecond-level visibility and service-centric insight essential for critical enterprise connectivity and managing large-scale, complex provider networks—the “owned” aspect of the global area network. This real-time visibility enables simplified operations and seamless digital experiences across carrier-grade environments.
This insight also enables our customers to boost revenue from advanced, high-QoS network services, while delivering competitive SLAs and exceptional digital experiences.
The value of a new breed of service-centric assurance
Global digital infrastructure company, Colt Technology Services, sees the value in offering performance control and visibility on their global networks to end customers. The company provides B2B customers with real-time usage and performance insight through end-customer portals, which became a differentiator during competitive request for proposal (RFP) processes. Colt credits the portals for a 30% upsell opportunity for capacity and services to existing customers. The customer-centric digital experience of the portal created a stickiness for Colt that also reduced churn by an estimated 25%.[1]
Internal operations teams at Colt that manage the transport network used the Provider Connectivity Assurance platform to cut operational expense (OpEx) by 50%, plus they were able to analyze trouble tickets approximately 35% faster. The integration of Provider Connectivity Assurance with Cisco Crosswork Network Services Orchestrator further reduced OpEx for mitigation by 25% thanks to automated closed-loop mitigation processes.
As Dr. Mark Mortensen, ACG Research, wrote in Economic Benefits of Service-Centric Assurance: “The advanced capabilities of a new breed of service-centric service assurance systems, best exemplified by Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Accedian Skylight), are filling in the holes that have hampered the movement of CSPs’ and large enterprises’ networks toward zero-trouble operations.”[2]
Almost every industry is currently undergoing digital transformation. Reliable, secure connectivity is key to digital resilience in terms of productivity, efficiency, and services that hit the experience mark. Every digital experience depends on a combination of owned and unowned infrastructures, and deep visibility across every part of these multidomain environments is critical, and now possible.
The combination of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance, Cisco Networking Cloud, and Digital Experience Assurance can help simplify how you manage your diverse infrastructure, and how you assure seamless digital experiences across it. Even better, it supports your efforts to offer more differentiated services, which means new revenue opportunities.
[1] Mark Mortensen, ACG Research, Economic Benefits of Service-Centric Assurance
[2] Mark Mortensen, ACG Research, Economic Benefits of Service-Centric Assurance
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