Real-time performance monitoring enables a new level of visibility

Network transformations are inherently challenging, and especially so for large, global enterprises with branches and other facilities spread across the world. One major reason is the growing diversity of their networks.

As part of their transformation, global companies are embracing the latest wifi, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), software-defined network (SDN), multicloud and 5G technologies. That makes for more complex and heterogeneous network infrastructures that are much more challenging to monitor and, by extension, makes problem identification and resolution take longer. So when these global organizations seek the help of a managed services provider (MSP) to assist in their transformations, they need to know their MSP is taking steps to raise the bar on network performance monitoring. It’s nothing short of essential to their becoming more agile and adaptable to the needs of their business.

Back in 2018, BT Business, one of the world’s leading MSPs, embarked on its own journey to transform its network performance monitoring capabilities required to support both current and next generation networks.

As Transformation Lead in the company’s Product Group, Hareesh Agaram was a pivotal figure in the effort, which began, he says, with an unflinching internal appraisal. “Our leadership team wrote a white paper that took a hard look at our performance monitoring challenges and laid out where we should be two years down the road. Its conclusions really resonated within the organization, and that’s when we started hunting for the right tool for the future.”

One of the key themes of BT Business’s vision was the need to provide a better experience for its global customers. As Hareesh explains, arguably the most fundamental issue his team needed to address was the inability to get a unified, real-time view into what was happening across the whole network. “Most of our global customers are not just one domain—we’re managing their LAN, WAN, wifi and SD-WAN,” he says. “We don’t want them having to do ‘swivel-chair management’—logging on to different tools or portals—to see how their network is doing. We want to give them a unified view across all domains, which we call a ‘single pane of glass.’”

Then there’s accountability. For a customer that expects its MSP to dynamically optimize the performance of its global network, real-time visibility and reporting provides a way to demonstrate it with hard data. The issue of capacity planning, Hareesh believes, is particularly apt. “For instance, [real-time visibility] can give a customer the assurance that the utilization of a key circuit is running at a healthy level, say 85%,” he says. “And it can give our own capacity planning team a way to make the case for expanding that customer’s capacity based on traffic analytics. In both cases, it helps demonstrate good, proactive stewardship of the customer’s network—and that’s a huge plus for satisfaction.”

When seeking a solution, BT Business looked at 16 vendors’ offerings, of which it selected five for the RFP stage. As part of the detailed evaluation process, three separate teams—from their operations, product and technology areas—conducted intensive demonstrations of the competing solutions and scored them on relevant criteria. In the end, BT Business chose IBM® SevOne® Network Performance Management (NPM) as its platform of the future. 

Looking back at the selection process, Hareesh notes that the SevOne NPM solution scored highly on the key features and capabilities discussed above, along with factors like the speed of large-scale deployment. But he’s quick to point out that his team was also swayed by a harder-to-define quality that set both IBM and the SevOne NPM solution apart. “IBM was able to demonstrate that they had a roadmap for newer technologies, like cloud and SD-WAN,” says Hareesh, “and it was closely aligned with our own technology vision.”

Working with SevOne NPM Professional Services, BT Business first deployed SevOne NPM for two of its largest customers. Within the next year and a half, the company had migrated over 800 additional customers. As of today, BT Business is monitoring more than 200,000 devices with SevOne NPM. And a close look at how things work today shows just how far the company has come toward achieving the vision it set forth at the beginning of the journey.

Let’s start with speed. The ability to deliver unified, real-time reporting of network performance through a decentralized architecture that enables “speed at scale” is a core value of SevOne NPM. It means that even as more devices and data centers are monitored by the solution, speed—whether it’s the building of routine utilization reports or identifying and addressing problems—remains high. It means fewer bottlenecks within the monitoring solution, no matter how wide the deployment scales.

For customers who had grown used to report generation as slow and arduous, Hareesh asserts, the real-time, portal-based reporting of SevOne NPM is nothing less than game-changing. “Our customers are telling us ‘this is amazing.’ We’re seeing that it redefines the way they see their networks, and it’s enhancing the value they perceive in being a BT Business customer.”

BT Business operates in an ultra-competitive market space where technology leadership and innovation truly matter. They’re critical to delivering the game-changing performance and reliability global enterprises have come to expect from their managed network providers.

But just as important, Hareesh believes, they send an unmistakable signal to customers of a provider’s commitment to supporting the growth and continuity of their businesses. “The journey we embarked on with IBM and SevOne has only strengthened our ability to deliver for customers,” he says, “and our customers have clearly taken notice.”

Based in London, BT Business (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a division of BT Group that provides global security, cloud and networking services to multinational companies worldwide, with operations in 180 countries.