As long as there has been public networking there has been network management and that's the good the bad and the good news again. The first piece of good news is that in 2008 and beyond that will still be the case. The bad news is that network management is going to change radically in that same period. The second piece of good news however is that these changes can be managed if they're addressed correctly. Just as there are three distinct pieces of 'news' there are also three major drivers of change.
First driver: Consumerization. The first major change in network management is driven by a major change in network mission. Network operators have tended to focus on 'convergence' as the driver for change but the real driver is a different 'c' word: 'consumerization.' Ten years ago enterprises purchased the only broadband connections where today the number of consumer broadband connections is 10-to-40 times the number of enterprise connections depending on the market area.
Consumerization creates a management problem for two reasons -- scale and literacy. Obviously multiplying the number of broadband users by a factor of 10 or more would likely multiply management demands similarly. That increase would threaten to explode operations and administration costs that for most operators are already three to four times capex as a percent of sales. When the increase in the number of connections is due to the introduction of broadband services to users with low technology literacy—which certainly describes the consumer—you create an even more alarming level of cost risk.
The only solution to controlling operations costs is to automate more operations. That requirement has created the largest challenge for the network management world because in order to automate consumer broadband operations you must take an outside-in view of network management. Why‾ No network operator would ever accept a service architecture that maintained individual consumer awareness (what network practitioners would call 'state') inside the network. Consumers are managed in aggregate on the network but they must be supported as individuals when they call for service.
The consumerization shift demands that network management be linked to a service management process that maintains customer-specific information and also provides a link between the customer process and the network resources that are linked to fulfilling the customer's services. Consumer broadband services whether internet VoIP or IPTV generate more customer care events than PSTN services and so it is critical that customer care provide direct links to not only billing data for inquiries and subscription data for service information but also network data.
Some might call this requirement an example of customer-focused service monitoring but the issue is much more complex. Service automation cannot be performed unless there is a machine-readable template to describe the service and to control how the service experience is created from network resources. A service management linkage to network management can in effect stand in for craft personnel making manual changes and provides the most reliable form of automated provisioning/commissioning of services modifications to existing services and processing terminations.
Management vendors and standards groups including IBM and Oracle in the former group and the Telemanagement Forum and DSL Forum in the latter have been working to develop this new service-to-network relationship and most of the pieces are already in place. They will come together convincingly in 2008.
Second driver: Increased computer technology use. A second issue for service provider network management is the increased use of computer technology to host service features content and applications used in service delivery.