Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi
May 2012
I watched the growth of technology before and during the evolution of the Internet phenomena. It is fascinating to point out how the power of technology can help enable almost all of the processes across an enterprise and tier 1 service providers. Let me elaborate on each of these separately:
- Power of Performance – Using “Concept of One and Zero”, that I invented and developed over the last decade, will facilitate business solutions for better, faster and less costly problem solving. This concept has and will continue to pave the way for process automation. The major components of the power of performance are:
- End to End Service Delivery and E-Servicing
- Automation Improvements that helps lower cycle time in delivery and execution so you can lower cost and increase revenue.
- E-Servicing Adoption which will allow customers, for the first time in history, to gain access to the heart of any service network providers processes, and results in the strategy of one person’s core is another person’s edge. This is a very profound understanding in the way architecture and applications must be designed to make this truly a reality.
- Service assurance starts with being Preventive, then evolving to Proactivity and finally getting to Predictability, until human to machine interfaces are minimized and ultimately eliminated.
- System Retirements — In this Industry and many companies, we have a model that systems and applications never die crating a project to retire old systems as new systems and applications get replaced. This can help immensely by reducing RTB (Running the Business) expenses, especially if companies are still running old mainframe computers versus state of art blade servers, with much more computation power than what the main frame can offer. And finally it will reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) objectives. One needs to reduce MTTR from hours to minutes by thinking about restoration first and repair second. In many instances, operational people, for the wrong reasons, push for repair rather than restoring service to the customer first.
These are fundamental requirements of the Power of performance in 21st Century. If any company follows the guidelines I outlined above, it will absolutely end up with a great technology and process weapon to win against any competitor.
- Power of Detection-In this scenario, networks must be converted to becoming the first line of defense. For example, if I know an attack is coming before it happens that would be better than being attacked and dealing with it after the fact, which could be massive in terms of loss of privacy and reliability. So, if any company can deliver speed, scale and breakthrough technology in their business, they will dominate all other competitors.
- Power of Protection – This is similar to the cloaking topic I discussed in previous blogs and is a form of stealth technology used to render an object invisible to the eye and to most sensor systems seen in Star Trek movies. Once operating in this model, one must truly revolutionize the entire security platform, within the enterprise. The service providers must be able to make that happen, and with advent of DPI; I see this as a strong possibility.
- Power of Unified Communications – this area of innovation deals with designing an architecture, systems, and applications that can be accessible anywhere, anytime to any communications device, whether it is smart phones, TVs, automobiles, ….etc. So, by enabling flexible, seamless services for customers for voice, data, video, gaming, wireless and sensory, the final vision of unified communications at the lowest cost may finally become reality given massive growth of video IP traffic by 2015. This will ultimately account for over 90 percent of the World Wide Web traffic.
- Power of Cybernetic Networks – In this model, one must continuously monitor and provide flexible commands and dynamic responses. In essence, this mode is about what I call true autonomic, where monitoring, decision making, and control will all be done in real time with analytics and personalization. The network will practically run by itself and outages that can take up to hour today, can be managed in less than 5 second or even lower if designed correctly, with virtual cloud computing. This vision is not far from reality and will provide automated restoration of service. We can then physically repair later, but impact to customers will be practically zero. DPM will approach 6 9s of reliability which is even better than 6 sigma performance.
- Power of Converged IP – It is clear almost all companies offer various IP-VPN services, surrounded by security features either at the edge or core of the network. So, my best recommendation is at the edge of the network, create a multi-service edge and consolidate and simplify all these products and converge them on one single platform, so that customers have the ability to design and provision their own services. This is called customer based real time provisioning and the network is considered a slave to the customer.
- Power of Network Convergence — Companies across the globe have invested over $100B in building out various IP and non IP (Packet Based like ATM, Frame) networks with no major focus on migrating customers to a full IP platform. Engineers make it even more complex by keeping these old networks in place. They seldom sunset these systems and applications and thus resulting in escalating costs, dramatically and more importantly lengthening cycle time for development and sustaining all of the APIs that have to be maintained between old systems and new systems, along with all of the different databases. I call it spaghetti architecture. So, if we move toward delivering flexibility and the proper integration level to serve customers better, enterprise customers can lower their cost and tier 1 service providers can increase revenue. This leads to the better of the two worlds in an all IP Internet world. Customers will also benefit from convergence in a majority of ways, including global, managed converged services, end to end solutions, virtual convergence, heterogeneous components, and technologies with market leading partners. No one could ask for anything better in this world for both customers and service provider.
- Power of Prevention — This is based on some basic blocking and tackling needed within a network to ensure that all aspects of reliability are taken seriously, including items such as back-up generator, especially in data centers, and using UPS to ensure continuity of service if an accident or incident occurs with or without human involvement.
- Power of Proactivity— This is the main principle for companies with service assurance responsibility for customers and it is based on using proactive methods and techniques to prevent impact to a customer’s network. That means certain levels of operational discipline are needed to make this a reality down to every operational personnel and even down to every developer, across every service assurance process.
10. Power of Predictability — This is by far the most impacting from reliability and a resiliency perspective. In this mode of operation, one must make the systems and applications smart enough to examine a massive amount of data to facilitate knowledge mining derive the probability of a failure to help prevent failures from occurring. In essence, the data analysis and business rules will identify with some degree of certainty the probability that a piece of equipment or software will fail, based on historical and stochastically based data, and finally dispatch operational personnel to make the fix before an actual customer impacting incident occurs.
In summary this technology doctrine is for companies to follow the Power of 9 described above, and provide continuous monitoring & flexible commands that can enable dynamic response with precision, targeting at various customers and then create a financial model dramatically different in this decade as compared to the last decade. I would also say if companies follow my guiding principles of power of 9, they will end up having the best and most sophisticated technology model, along with more targeted and effective personalization for customers. It also exploits stealth technology described above along with employing a variety of technology weapons that can be extremely effective.
