Cell C Sees All

The overview-dashboards are driven by the service-management
thresholds. As stated previously, this is the im- framework (SMF), and any
petus for further analysis and most importantly, fa i lures are i m me d ia tel y
the plans and actions to correct any deviations. highlighted. Action plans are
formulated and executed in
Q:A as little as 30 minutes to pre-
_i lot of telecom services and applications now
nvolve multiple everything: operators, networks, vent failures from re-occur-
technologies, the list goes on. In that kind of environ- ring. In this manner, service
ment, how can operators ensure a good customer e performance can be main-
xperience and verify SLAs? tained at almost 100%, and
Hadlow: The reality is that most are flying we can guarantee customer
blind. Services often span many disparate en- experience.
vironments (and/or operators), with a plethora The performance of the
of technologies used in each. This is a direct various resources (infrastruc-
result of differing strategies and approaches ture) within the SOA is also
to solving individual problems. The chasm measured independently of
between telecom and IT is also narrowing fast the services, and trends are
(and has disappeared in some cases), and the constantly monitored to iden-
need for converged technology strategies is a tify possible problems. CA
definite reality. Wily is used for all the Java 2

Monitoring becomes almost impossible in this Enterprise Edition (J2EE) en- environment unless a common framework is vironments to measure, ana- defined for it. Parties need to agree on control lyze and monitor the building points (for measuring) and the SLAs for each blocks (resources) of services, control point. Often this is abstracted to the net- andevenservicesthemselves. work interfaces and measured where the cus- This “matrix” of monitoring enables us to pin- tomer enters and exits. This approach, though point problems in a service and the supporting good for CEM, will be very difficult to enforce or resources even before they happen based fix as the detailed level of monitoring is absent, purely on the trends shown. and the root cause will often be unknown.

Vendors entering such an environment will In these fully automated processes, how can you _{often resort to point-solutions (for a particu-} Q:_{ensure that all orders go through?} lar service or solution) and not address the Hadlow: The Cell C SOA provides the infra- problem holistically. This is the role of the structure for managing services. This SOA

[operator] architect. Over the last two years, infrastructure includes the ability to guarantee significant progress has been made to align the successful outcome of a service, the man- not only the integration of vendor-platforms agement of services and the monitoring of ser- (to SOA), but also to provide common mecha- vices. This framework is built on J2EE, making nisms for monitoring these systems and the extensive use of Business Process Execution solutions they support. Language (BPEL), Extensible Markup Language

(XML) and standardized integration platforms

Q:S such as Weblogic Integration. _bo how does Cell C ensure that it catches problems efore they become noticeable to customers? Mobile number portability (MNP) is one such

Hadlow: All services are monitored and service. Very strict SLAs are enforced by the measured within a common framework called regulator requiring fault tolerant, intelligent