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gen-E logogen-E OpsCenter Delivering Real Time Optimisation

InterComms reviews gen-E’s product offering

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Hgen-E OpsCenter™ helps telecommunications and enterprise organizations maximize their investment in existing systems and tools to deliver outstanding service assurance visualization, control and automation through real-time prediction, monitoring and optimization of the service.

What key challenges are impacting service providers today that are driving the need for new service assurance (SA) solutions, and how does gen-E OpsCenter address these?

Current SA solutions were built before the explosion of new data services and technology. Today’s NOC teams are being challenged to manage increasingly complex networks comprised of modern networking technologies, (NFV-SDN, 5G, Network Slicing, Cloud) and data-intensive services (VoLTE, Video, SD-WAN, NaaS) with OSS solutions that were not designed to address these issues. This is having a disruptive impact on existing, often-static, siloed OSS stacks.

Current ‘gaps’ in legacy SA solutions:

  • NFV - SDN ready – ability to work with new virtualized and hybrid networks
  • Automation – there are now too many faults and alarms to manage manually. Closed loop functionality with highly configurable rules (policy engine) enable greater automation and responsiveness to faults and alarms and faster root cause analysis.
  • End-to-end visibility – with hybrid networks, there is the need to have a single, consolidated view of the network and avoid ‘swivel-chair’ solutions.
  • Machine learning – soon, machine learning capabilities will identify a problem in the network, locate its root cause, and repair the issue, without depending on pre-defined policies or rules.
  • Interoperability – ability to easily connect with other systems and data sources through open APIs
  • Scalability – ability to ingest, manage and analyze massive amounts of data

gen-E OpsCenter™ – powered by IBM® Tivoli® Netcool® - helps telecommunications and enterprise organizations deliver outstanding service assurance visualization, control, and automation to their customers through real-time network optimization and fault prediction, event monitoring and ‘noise’ reduction. OpsCenter adds next-gen service assurance capabilities to existing Netcool infrastructure, working together with IBM’s Netcool Operations Insight (NOI) to eliminate the most burdensome aspects of event resolution and address some of the most pressing network transformation challenges.

Ensure mission critical applications never go down with OpsCenter’s sophisticated service assurance software. OpsCenter captures all network data in real-time, then correlates and analyzes this against complex fault mitigation history and user generated data, feeding valuable information into Netcool to create alarms at the first sign of an anomaly. This predictive approach improves performance and reduces system downtime.

How does gen-E address the concerns of today’s Netcool customers?

gen-E OpsCenter is an event management solution designed to work in conjunction with legacy systems and tools, providing additional benefits of a modern service assurance architecture – including greater scalability to ingest more data from more sources, machine-learning driven analytics for faster MTTR and root cause analysis, and the ability to prepare networks with the capabilities needed for assuring new services and technologies, including NFV-SDN and 5G network slicing.

  • For companies saddled with legacy software, OpsCenter allows service providers and enterprise businesses to extend the life of existing infrastructure by providing a layer of technology that is custom-designed for Netcool customers, delivering all the benefits of a next-gen service assurance solution without the pain, risk, or cost of removing and replacing their existing Netcool investment.
  • Proven Results: OpsCenter customer case study shows 98% reduction in events, $2.7M in savings in some instances.

OpsCenter Search’s powerful analytics capabilities can quickly identify what is making the most noise (alarms) in the network, creating a heatmap of journal entries – geographically tracking everyone who has ‘touched’ each event during its path towards resolution. The solution can also be used to detect unusual event rates and analyze data based on informs and discards. Its advanced analytics and elastic search capabilities allow users to query historical data and resolve complex issues more quickly by asking things like, ‘what are the top 5 things I have done to solve these issues in the past?’

The next iteration of this offering will include advanced Machine Learning and root cause analysis capabilities. This will reduce a carrier’s reliance upon search and pre-defined event management rules, enabling the solution to more quickly identify and resolve network issues. By leveraging the large amount of historical event information OpsCenter captures, new models can be trained that will automate many of the alarms and alerts that today require manual intervention.

OpsCenter Search Provides:

- Horizontal Scalability- ingest and link large volumes of disparate data
- The ability to capture, store and search valuable historical data related to all network events
- A way to analyze data trends and provide alerts directly into Netcool
- The ability to save frequently used search patterns for reuse later
- Integration with IBM Operations Analytics – with right-click tools to drill down for situational analysis
- Easy integration with 3rd part systems through open APIs, leveraging the REST standard
- Machine learning capabilities will enhance network performance by detecting network events even where no rules exist; reducing MTTR and automating root cause analysis.

About gen-E
gen-E provides IT and network management software and services, leveraging industry-leading solutions from IBM and others, to companies with mission-critical operations. gen-E enables clients to dramatically reduce costs, improve efficiency and deliver higher quality service by providing greater visibility, control and automation of their operational systems. As an IBM Gold Partner, gen-E has deep industry knowledge and extensive experience servicing regional and Fortune 500 companies.

gen-E’s OpsCenter™ empowers organizations to leverage and enhance their investment in IBM software to predict, analyse and resolve network problems while cutting redundant costs. It provides a lean and agile cost model to maximize capacity and monetize a new generation of network-based services while delivering a consistently high-quality customer experience.

“We are honoured to have been recognized by CIOReview as one of the Top 50 Most Promising IBM Solution Providers,” said Mike Henderson, Interim CEO, gen-E. “We designed OpsCenter™ to build upon the powerful capabilities of IBM’s IT Service Management portfolio, going well beyond today’s IT and network management capabilities to help companies support new standards and technologies while adding a never-before- available layer of predictive analytics,” added Henderson.

gen-E logoFor more information visit:
www.gen-e.com

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