Telus found success with Spectrum Event Manager, used by the company to automate service response procedures while guaranteeing individual service level agreements. LaChance says Telus is: delivering proactive notification to customers before they are impacted by a degradation of service; guaranteeing network availability of 99.7 per cent per site, per service, per month; and providing scalable infrastructure management that can support multi-vendor devices.
The system, purchased in 1996, continuously monitors the network for traps indicating a service interruption. Details of any problems are automatically forwarded using the Trouble Event Forwarder (TEF) to Telus' trouble-ticketing system. The trouble-ticketing system discovers what services have been interrupted by looking at the network element to service through correlation with an Oracle database. At three regional network operating centres, the system is continually communicating with more than 13,000 connected nodes nationally, approximately 6000 Cisco routers, 300-plus Catalyst 5500s and more than 1000 Sun servers.
In the highly-competitive telco environment, a service provider's success or failure depends on offering continued, reliable services to its customer base. And better still from its customers' point of view, the solution lets Telus define and monitor services per site, per service, per month, with no averaging.
"A trouble ticket is automatically generated and the operations person is paged,"LaChance says. "What's important to note is that all the information that the operator requires is readily available in the ticket. Therefore Â'OOIR' or Â'Ooh, Ooh, It's Red' is not practised at Telus,"she says.
"All information automatically generated into the ticket is real-time from the central database, providing customer information, affected device and description of the problem,"she says.
LaChance says Telus beats all competitors on "speed to notify", giving it a major competitive edge. "If we didn't have this we would be fighting on price points,"she says. "This lets us avoid that for the most part. Customers will still try to get a good price, but this gives a lot of value add."
Telus can also grow the network and increase the network and service base without adding much in the way of headcount for operational support. "In an environment where people are staring at screens, if you put a lot more devices on the network, you would have to put in a lot more people to look at the screens, to keep an eye on things. But because all of this is automatic we have not had to put on the headcount to look after the network as it grows."
And the solution is allowing Telus to really put some "skin in the game", LaChance says. "We guarantee 99.7 per cent availability, per site, per service, per month, or we start rebating the bill, starting at 20 per cent. We will rebate as much as 80 per cent of the bill for that month - and we don't average.
"In other words, if a customer buys services and they have 18 sites, and one site goes down for 18 hours, we don't average that out and say: Â'Well, gee, that means it was only one hour if you average it out. We don't owe you any money.' If that site was down for 18 hours we will not be charging any money. The actual service for the entire month will be discounted at the 80 per cent mark."
That prospect of having to rebate money to its customers gives Telus a pretty powerful incentive to get the SLAs right, LaChance says, and also helps it better manage its internal business. "For instance, if the reason why we keep losing connectivity is we need to desperately upgrade a piece of equipment, from a financial perspective it's good leverage to say: 'We need to make sure we have the appropriate infrastructure in place. Can we please get the correct capital funds to look after that area?',"she says.
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