Telcordia Targets Enterprise IP Assurance Market Through Channel Partners

Telcordia came to market this week with a new product for IP service assurance, but more important is the way the company is getting there and the market it’s after. Telcordia is targeting the enterprise market through channel partners and offering a hosted version of its IP Assure solution for an automated and non-intrusive assessment and awareness of IP networks.

The solution aims to ensure security, availability, quality of service and regulatory compliance. It also will improve and speed network error detection and problem resolution.

“Today, IP networks are not best effort anymore,” Rajesh Talpade, chief scientist in Telcordia’s advanced technology group.

Telcordia IP Assure was designed to provide IP network operators with an automated and non-intrusive software solution for keeping networks safe, secure and running smoothly. It has proved successful in trials, in particular in one with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to research Telcordia undertook with Frost & Sullivan, 66 percent of key IT decision makers are significantly dissatisfied with the ability of existing solutions to provide adequate security and availability for IP networks. One of their biggest complaints was the ability to support IPv6.

“Many IT managers] are looking to adopt IPv6, but need to make sure there are solutions that can help them make the transition and them meet the expectations a v6 network provides,” Talpade said.

Telcordia is addressing the waning of availability, compromised security, regulatory non-compliance and poor QoS, brought on by a growing number of IP-based devices (1.5 for every 10 users) and services as well as a high turnover of network and security personnel, other organizational changes and regulatory demands.

According to Yankee Group, IT departments currently spend 90 percent of their troubleshooting time trying to isolate an issue. Yankee also said the first place to look is for configuration errors as they account for 62 percent of all IP network downtime. Reduce configuration errors and the time to troubleshoot and you reduce the mean time to repair.

Reducing configuration errors also would reduce cyber attacks as 65 percent of all such attacks exploit wrongly configured systems, according to Gartner.

Vanessa Alvarez, analyst at Yankee Group, said in an age where IP network outages and breaches can impact negatively a company’s revenues and corporate reputation, and put them at risk of regulatory non-compliance, it is imperative that network managers have fool-proof assurances that their networks remain secure, compliant and available. “Telcordia IP Assure addresses this enterprise need to balance adequate security with high availability for IP networks,” she said.

Vendor- and Device-Neutral Service Assurance Solution

Telcordia considers its IP Assure solution to be a network management breakthrough, because it is a vendor- and device-neutral solution that leverages patent-pending Telcordia algorithms and a built-in rules database to perform non-intrusive analysis of all IP routers, switches and firewalls. It also mines data from network inventory, discovery and monitoring elements to provide a complete understanding of network conditions.

The solution proactively assesses networks and protocols; automatically delivers real-time, multilevel, multiprotocol (VLAN, VPN, routing, IP subnet) IP network views; verifies configurations before devices are installed; scales to accommodate large, complex and dynamic IP infrastructures.

Although Telcordia has had many government sector contracts, the enterprise sector itself is less familiar. So it is taking two approaches. “Given where we are in the market with our traditional sales teams focused on service providers, we are also announcing a channel-based go to market strategy,” Talpade said.

Channel Partners such as Accenture and IBM will sell the software directly to enterprises as a point solution. Service providers will sell the solution in a hosted model. “We’re not ignoring any beachhead sales ourselves, but we have limited capability in reaching out to enterprises,” Talpade said.

Telcordia will be in the unfamiliar position of allowing its partners to take ownership of the customer relationships; handle the deployments, customization and training; and maintain the relationship.

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