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Rene Luyten
Projects & Planning
Swisscom Mobile AG
Cisco Mobile is the Swiss leading mobile service provider.
Frank Goeble
Manager Netzuberwachung NOC
Unity Media GmbH
Unity Media is one of the big cable providers in Germany. And in addition it's a [procom] provider mainly for the German soccer market.
LUYTEN: Service management means integration of technology, tools, processes and operations staff.
GOEBLE: Service management for me is that we meet customer expectations in terms that when the customer buys the products usually delivered to him.
LUYTEN: In the past when we had a homogeneous network with only one technical domain, we had one screen, but then we have seen new technologies appear that would have mean for each technology an individual screen for its alarms and we have seen this is not handle-able for the operators. Therefore we needed one common umbrella solution which provides consolidated view about the whole network.
GOEBLE: The main area we are focused in is in service management as far as handling all of our network elements and binding them together with the service we deliver over those service network elements.
LUYTEN: We have looked at several tools and systems available on the market. Then we have seen that the NetCool solution is the most flexible and easy adaptable solution on the market.
GOEBLE: The reason why we choose and have chosen IBM solution for this is, it's easy to handle. It's scalable. We can easily adapt that tool to our needs. This means it's not a big thing to add new network elements to it, as well as new different types. That's one of the reasons. And we see it as well as a tool which has future.
LUYTEN: The NetCool solution has enabled us to concentrate all events and alarms in one single screen. So it's much more easier for the operator to find out where the problem fix is.
GOEBLE: They first enabled us to get a common network management for asynchronous data which was not done before. And secondly it enabled us to get in view on really all of our network equipment to get them through to one single point to see how they work.
LUYTEN: The NetCool [wrapped] product has helped us to draw up a dependency model of our services which allows us to track the service level impact of several incidents to our services.
GOEBLE: The main advantage of using IBM Service Management for us is that we see all those things together aligned before it was mainly network element managers and all of those so we can actually compile really consistent information about what is the service behavior and how healthy is the service or not.
LUYTEN: In the future, we will definitely have new systems which have to be integrated. And another challenge will be conversions between fixed and mobile. And the NetCool solution looks to be a flexible and interchangeable solution which is capable to cope with these issues.
GOEBLE: This tools which IBM delivers is a very good vehicle to traverse from where we are at the moment -- a lot of alarms, a lot of uncertainty -- towards a time when we all really [INAUDIBLE] what's going on in our network, understand our services better and much better can judge on what should we do and what we should not do.