Service management for communications service providers - CSPs. Learn about key challenges, IBM's approach to service management, and explore the key elements of IBM Service Management for CSPs. Communications service providers (CSPs) today face a world where continuous change is the norm. CSPs now need to innovate continuously to deliver customer value and must also embrace the creativity of their business partners to succeed against aggressive competition.

1. White paper
December 2008
IBM Service Management for
communications service providers
IBM Service Management Solutions™

2. IBM Service Management for communications service providers
Page 2
Overview
Contents
Communications service providers (CSPs) today face a world where
continuous change is the norm. Traditional PSTN revenues are declining
2 Overview
rapidly, and only single-digit annual growth is forecast for broadband and
2 Key service management
mobile voice through 2011.1 At the same time, a wide range of new, content-
challenges
3 IBM’s service management rich services from IPTV to music to gaming are set to generate billions of
approach dollars in new revenues.
4 Asset management
5 Configuration This shift to a diverse set of high-touch services is fundamentally changing
management the CSP business model. CSPs now need to innovate continuously to deliver
6 Service assurance customer value and must also embrace the creativity of their business partners
7 Security management to succeed against aggressive competition. Delivering an accelerating pipeline
8 Data management
of new services to market quickly, repeatedly and cost-effectively demands
9 The IBM Service
unparalleled agility. Focus on customer perception is essential to drive service
Management for CSPs
framework adoption, and to protect and enhance a CSP’s biggest asset—its brand.
11 Summary
IBM has worked with CSPs to jointly define essential capabilities needed to
12 For more information
prosper in this new landscape. This white paper focuses on one important
component of this service lifecycle—service management. It covers key
challenges, IBM’s approach to service management, and the key elements of a
holistic, integrated service management solution.
Key service management challenges
As CSPs pursue new opportunities in a landscape of constant reinvention and
increasing competition, they face a paradox: building agility, innovation and
quality in an increasingly complex environment with unrelenting cost
pressure. How do they:
● Eliminate the high cost of maintaining, upgrading, and operating
inflexible legacy operational systems, and migrate to an agile,
configurable environment for managing new services?
● Procure and deploy new assets such as LTE and converged IP backbones
cost-effectively within an already-complex infrastructure? How do CSPs
ensure that these assets are deployed and configured accurately, and are
optimally maintained?

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● Defend against new security risks as they move from proprietary
infrastructures to converged IP networks and open up their Web 2.0
services to both third parties and end users?
● Create end-to-end visibility across an increasingly complex service delivery
chain that now integrates third-party content and services?
● Manage the explosion in data due to both new content-based services and
online storage of end-user data such as e-mails, blogs, Web pages, and
photos?
● Meet customers’ quality expectations when one poor service can affect
overall service uptake? How do they pinpoint the root cause of service
issues as they happen? How do they understand what services customers
are using, and what they are experiencing in near real time to reduce
churn and create upsell?
IBM’s service management approach
IBM’s approach to service
management can help CSPs Service assurance is a key component of service management, and IBM has a
manage diverse service strong track record of market leadership in service assurance, working in
characteristics. partnership with CSPs. However, a service must be more than available and
responsive to succeed. It must have customer value, be both affordable
and profitable, and be trusted and easy to use. To drive service adoption and
create sustainable advantage, CSPs need to manage these diverse service
characteristics holistically. This is the role and promise of service
management.
IBM’s approach to service management is to deliver pragmatic, targeted
solutions built on an open, modular, consistent and integrated service
management framework. This allows CSPs to drive short-term payback with
solutions that integrate with existing processes, systems and organizations
while, at the same time, creating long-term leverage.
These solutions fall into five key focus areas, as shown in Figure 1:
● Asset management: Building an economical physical foundation for
high-quality services.
● Configuration management: Enabling service quality via accurate asset
configuration.

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● Service assurance: Cost-effective management of service quality and
customer experience.
● Security management: Seamless integration of services into a trusted
environment.
● Data management: Enhancing service value by enabling rich and robust
content.
Figure 1: The key elements of holistic service management
Asset management
CSPs face significant challenges as they deploy new infrastructure needed to
support high-bandwidth content-based services. For example:
● Planning, procurement and field engineering need to work together so
that infrastructure is procured economically, deployed cost-effectively and
optimally maintained.
● Inventory management systems need up-to-date and precise asset
information for accurate service provisioning.
● Financial and risk management teams must track high-value assets to
measure ROI and drive financial and regulatory reporting.

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Asset management provides consistent management across the asset lifecycle
IBM asset management
capabilities can help CSPs (planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance and retirement) and from
integrate procurement, the last mile to the data center. It links procurement, financial, inventory, and
configuration management, workflow systems, providing a consistent asset view, eliminating duplication,
maintenance workflows, inventory
improving accuracy, and enabling process optimization. For example:
management, and service desk.
● It enables just-in-time procurement, allowing CAPEX to be delayed or
reduced.
● Field engineering can optimize installation processes, automate stock
tracking and integrate seamlessly with vendor return and repair processes.
● Combining asset management with IBM RFID technology can create a
self-inventorying network, reducing effort, improving data accuracy, and
correcting deployment errors.
While designed to integrate with incumbent systems, IBM asset management
is built on the same technology as other key components of IBM Service
Management for CSPs. Deploying these together creates significant relational
value, such as seamless handoff of asset records to configuration management,
and design and execution of asset workflows within an integrated service desk.
Configuration management
As CSPs deploy new content-based services, they need to configure those
services and underlying infrastructure quickly and accurately. IP infrastructure
simplifies this, but extended delivery chains introduce complexities, and
existing infrastructure (for example, RANs) remains a challenge. For example,
CSPs tell IBM:
● They lack uniform ways of identifying resources across planning, field
engineering, and operations, resulting in process, cost, and quality issues.
● There is no consistent way of sharing essential configuration data across
operational systems, with point-to-point integrations creating cost without
leverage.
● The majority of service impairments are due to unplanned configuration
changes. However, they worry about the cost and achievability of
centralized configuration management and its productivity impact.

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IBM’s configuration management approach delivers pragmatic solutions to
these challenges and is built on three fundamental principles:
● Federate and reconcile data sources, rather than incurring the risk and
cost of a centralized configuration data repository.
● Leverage existing configuration tools—don’t replace them.
● Enable flexible management of both planned and unplanned change.
IBM is working actively today to deliver solutions based on these core
principles, including:
● Management of resource naming during infrastructure rollout, enabling
process integration and optimization.
● Sharing of network and service models across IBM Service Management
components, and providing open access to this information to other
systems.
● Correlating unplanned changes with network and service problems in
order to automate root cause detection, drive escalation, and suppress
sympathetic alarms due to configuration errors.
Service assurance
It is more important than ever that CSPs focus on the customer’s perception
of quality to drive service adoption. CSPs are looking for service assurance
solutions that span across devices, networks, services, and customers, creating
a paradigm where everything flows from the customer’s perception of quality,
moving from customer impact to root cause in a few easy steps.
At the same time, CSPs are focused on efficiency, consolidation, and
driving down legacy costs. They are then reinvesting in automated,
configurable service assurance tools designed to work together across
converging networks and organizations—without compromising on best-of-
breed capabilities.

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IBM offers a comprehensive and integrated set of service assurance
Comprehensive service assurance
capabilities from IBM can help capabilities, battle-hardened in customer implementations around the globe.
CSPs improve service quality and These carrier-grade, highly scalable solutions include:
help drive service adoption.
● Fault and event management: An industry-leading, highly scalable
“manager of managers.”
● Performance management: Multi-vendor solutions for wireless, IP, and
wireline networks.
● Systems management: Assuring the health of application and content
platforms.
● Network discovery: Layer 1 to 3 data network discovery and wireless
network discovery.
● Service quality management: Real-time and historical service quality,
SLA, and customer experience management solutions.
● Service transaction monitoring: Active and passive monitoring of
transaction response.
● Service request management: Flexible and configurable next-generation
workflow and service desk capabilities, offering both superior scalability
and ease of upgrade.
Security management
As CSPs deliver diverse services over a converged IP infrastructure, they face
a range of security issues:
● IP networks provide a single point of attack across services, creating
revenue risks and compromising the trust needed for initiatives such as
mobile micropayments.
● Current security infrastructures for legacy networks are fragmented and
are not suited to a converged IP environment.
● As services multiply, customers will adopt them only if there is unified
access, and if preferences and identity are preserved across services
(for example, a single wallet).

8. IBM Service Management for communications service providers
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IBM security management capabilities address these specific security issues:
● Security management capabilities can also be deployed stand-alone,
enabling highly scalable n-tier architectures. These capabilities can be
integrated with event management, providing a common, streamlined
network and security operations center.
● IBM Service Management for CSPs delivers a federated access and
identity management environment for integrating both internal and third-
party services into a CSP’s services portal. This approach allows CSPs to
take advantage of both in-house development and branded or white-label
partner services to drive revenues.
Data management
IBM data management solutions
can help CSPs deliver continuous As CSPs deliver rich, content-based services, they are facing an explosion in
and reliable access to ever- content—not only the content that they are delivering but the content that
increasing data volumes. their customers are generating as they move their lives online. CSPs are
actively promoting storage to their customers, from baby pictures to blogs and
e-mail, driving ever-increasing data volumes. CSPs also face new regulatory
requirements to retain usage data and content, driven by fraud, forensics, and
anti-terror initiatives. CSPs tell us they are struggling to cope with this content
growth, and are seeking to establish a clear and unified data management
strategy.
IBM continues to invest heavily to help its CSP customers with their
information management challenges, both internally and through over 20 key
acquisitions since 2005. IBM has solutions that can help CSPs deliver
continuous and reliable access to information, enable secure sharing of
information, address retention requirements, and facilitate efforts to comply
with internal and regulatory requirements.

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IBM Service Management is an integral part of this information
management strategy, providing best-in-class data protection and retention
capabilities designed to minimize data loss risks, reduce the spiraling cost of
data management, and help ensure that data is available 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. It can help CSPs protect their data from failures and other
errors by storing backup, archive, and bare-metal restore data, as well as
compliance and disaster-recovery data in a flexible hierarchy of online and
offline storage.
The IBM Service Management for CSPs framework
The IBM Service Management
for CSPs framework enables IBM Service Management for CSPs consists of a modular and integrated set of
federated, contextual sharing of components and best practices for service management. Because it is modular,
information across modular, solutions can be deployed using only the appropriate components, reducing
integrated components. costs, and accelerating time to value. As it is integrated, deployed components
are reusable in other solutions and are leveraged over time into a consistent
service management framework.
At the heart of the IBM Service Management for CSPs framework,
shown in Figure 2, is a common software backplane, providing federated,
contextual sharing of information across components. Asset and configuration
management components are built from the bottom up, using this backplane
technology and allowing critical data to be shared seamlessly. The integrated
workflow engine and service desk are also based on this technology so that
workflows and problem handling are intimately linked with asset state and
configuration, increasing accuracy and improving efficiency.

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Figure 2: The IBM Service Management for CSPs framework
Front-end integration is provided through a contextually linked portal where
component UIs plug in as portlets and share data, enabling a seamless and
consistent user experience, and allowing high-value solutions to be created
across components. Key components are being integrated into this portal
today, and it is poised to become the common framework across all
components.

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Summary
An integral component of the
IBM SPDE, IBM Service IBM Service Management for CSPs delivers a set of pragmatic solutions to the
Management for Communications key service management challenges that CSPs face today as they balance the
Service Providers addresses need to deliver innovative, new services with the need to drive efficiency and
the key service management manage costs. These solutions, covering asset management, configuration
challenges that today’s CSPs
management, service assurance, security management, and data management,
are facing.
build into a holistic and open framework for managing the essential service
characteristics needed for success: quality, usability, value, trust, affordability,
and profitability.
IBM Service Management for CSPs is an integral component of the
IBM Service Provider Delivery Environment (SPDE), a complete service
lifecycle framework, covering service innovation, service creation, service
execution, service integration, service management, and customer/partner
management. It is also part of a broader set of solutions designed to improve
visibility, control, and automation across the enterprise:
● Visibility to help improve service quality and customer retention: True,
real-time, end-to-end visibility into the source and resolution of issues that
compromise network performance and availability, service quality, and the
customer experience.
● Control to help maximize return on assets and reduce risk: A cost-
effective, robust, security-rich and agile foundation on which to build
delivery of next-generation services—backed by best practices.
● Automation to help streamline processes and accelerate growth:
Integrations across the service management portfolio and with other
OSS/IT systems to help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and increase
responsiveness.

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IBM Corporation Software Group
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