Automated Provisioning and OpexAutomated Provisioning and Opex

When management of diverse elements and dynamic networks becomes a pain point, tools become more essential than ever.

We had a very informative Enterprise Connect Webinar yesterday, featuring Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research and Teresa Dixon of Unimax (you can find the replay here). Among other things, it brought home the value of automating provisioning and related capabilities that center around bringing users on and off the communications network.Here's an interesting slide that Robin presented, which shows what Nemertes' research with end users has shown about the costs and timing of management rollouts:

That figure showing that almost half of those surveyed wait 3 years before deploying specialized management tools is distressing if not especially surprising. It's pretty much the way of the world that companies only roll out network management--for whatever the application or device--only when the lack of that management capability becomes a proven and no-longer-bearable pain point.

The benefit, once you do roll out the management, was shown on Robin's next slide:

In discussing some of these issues in the Webinar, one of the most interesting comments that Teresa made was that in her experience, putting in the management tools is often the first step in just finding out exactly what's going on in the network--what assets you really have and how they're being used. "We put in the tools, and the customer spends two weeks going, 'Oh really? Oh really?'" she said--in other words, they're surprised at some of the basic information they're gaining about their networks.

And I suspect that "discovery" process--the human kind, not the kind you get from SNMP and such--will only get more, shall we say...interesting...as the so-called "consumerization of IT" continues. Only instead of finding out there's a lot on your network that you didn't know about, you'll maybe be finding that what you expected to be on your network isn't there--that these management systems may be ways of detecting assets that are underutilized or even un-utilized, as end users migrate to unapproved or un-connected devices.

But what it all comes back to is the old truism that you can't manage what you can't measure--and you can neither manage nor measure what you can't see.When management of diverse elements and dynamic networks becomes a pain point, tools become more essential than ever.