InfoVista (NASDAQ: IVTA; Euronext IFV – FR0004031649), the leading service-centric performance management software company, announced today the availability of VistaInsight(TM) for Networks for Service Providers, version 2.0 (VIN for Service Providers 2.0), a next-generation performance management solution that enables service providers to effectively meet and exceed performance and service requirements for today’s advanced communications technologies including Metro Ethernet. The key enhancements to VIN for Service Providers 2.0 include out-of-box functionality to quickly and cost-effectively deliver new IP VPN and Metro Ethernet services and enhanced customer-reporting functionalities to enable tiered service offerings.
The adoption of Metro Ethernet – the enabling technology behind advanced communications applications like IP VPN, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and virtual private LAN Services (VPLS) – is on the rise and Infonetics Research estimates the Metro Ethernet market will grow 150 percent by 2007. Capitalizing on this trend, service providers are rapidly expanding new offerings, driven by dual market demand from enterprises that seek new connectivity services and residential users that seek triple play applications — voice (VoIP), video (IPTV) and data services over a single broadband network. With these new offerings comes a need for standards-based Ethernet performance management solutions for service providers which provide advanced capabilities such as Layer 2 VPN and Ethernet aggregation management for both Enterprise and Consumer services. At the same time, as service providers increasingly move toward a tiered approach to service delivery, these solutions must offer value through differentiated levels of performance and service.
“As the demand for Ethernet services continues to grow so does our need for sophisticated management tools that enable us to speed time-to-market with a tiered service offering that supports bottom-line profitability,” said Denia Katsuda, Senior Manager of Network Systems Engineering, COLT Telecom. “Based on years of experience working with leading service providers to capitalize on the latest technologies and market demand, InfoVista’s newest solution is an exciting development.”
A highly scalable, reliable and flexible solution, VIN for Service Providers 2.0 offers the following new features and enhancements:
— IP VPN and Metro Ethernet performance management – The cornerstone of enhancements for VIN for Service Providers 2.0 rests in InfoVista’s accurate modeling of IP VPN services, Metro Ethernet services and hybrids of the two (EoMPLS). This provides service-centric intelligence by identifying and associating the appropriate relationships between service provider edge devices (POPs, PEs), virtual edge-to-edge connections (VPNs, VLANs, VPLSs, Pseudowires), traffic prioritization (QoS, CoS), customer edge devices (CEs) and customer names and their locations. End-user quality-of-experience service levels are linked to these models to provide a structured, priority-based and service-centric approach to performance management, in contrast to traditional first-come, first-served models.
— Customer-reporting enhancements – Preconfigured customer-facing Portal pages and navigation structures have been enhanced with workflow-oriented dashboards and reports. These optimized navigations have been developed to industry standards such as RFC 2457 and MEF 7, and honed through years of experience in hundreds of customer implementations. Whether through premium reporting or Managed Services offerings, those reports help business users gain insight into class-of-service loading and impending capacity shortages, justifying a business case for service upgrades.
— Out-of-the-box reports – Building on InfoVista’s proven experience with in-depth network reporting on traditional and next generation WAN and LAN technologies, new MetroE reporting and enhanced QoS reporting are now included. A new catalog of market-ready reports enables service providers to quickly build competitive portfolios of tiered service offerings.
— Ease of integration – VIN for Service Providers 2.0 is engineered to easily integrate with Cisco ISC and Alcatel 5620 SAM, the leading platforms for Metro Ethernet provisioning, and automates reporting configurations. InfoVista’s object-based architecture supports rapid adjustment to evolving, and increasingly prevalent, requirements, enabling service providers to better respond to the performance management needs of their large enterprise customers.
“InfoVista is delivering what carriers need to proactively monitor next generation networks – networks that are far more brittle than what’s come before,” says Dan Baker, Research Director of the Dittberner Associates OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase. “We give InfoVista high marks for designing in things that carriers consider important: A strong reporting capability; flexibility to adapt new resources on the fly; and lower cost of ownership thanks to do-it-yourself configurations.”
With enhanced functionality and a new architecture, VIN for Service Providers 2.0 builds on InfoVista’s ten years of experience providing performance management solutions to the world’s largest service providers and enterprises. In developing the upgrades, InfoVista leveraged its expertise with both service provider and enterprise constituents, as well as the work from industry bodies such as Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).
“Today’s service providers wear two hats when managing the performance of their network infrastructures,” said Manuel Stopnicki, chief technology officer, InfoVista. “They must at once deliver new services with differentiated service levels and properly communicate that performance information in a way that is digestible to enterprise customers. With extensive experience in both service provider and enterprise environments, InfoVista is uniquely positioned to support both of these important objectives.”
VIN is currently generally available, and pricing varies based on deployment size.
About InfoVista
InfoVista is the Service-Centric Performance Management Software Company that assures the optimal delivery of business-critical IT services. Driven by a uniquely adaptive and real-time technology foundation, InfoVista solutions improve business effectiveness, reduce operating risk, lower cost of operations, increase agility and create competitive advantage. Eighty percent of the world’s largest service providers as ranked by Fortune(R), as well as leading Global 2000 enterprises, rely on InfoVista to enhance the business value of their technology assets. Representative customers include ABN AMRO, Allstream, Banques Populaires, AXA, Banque de France, Bell Canada, British Telecom, Broadwing Communications, Cable & Wireless, Com Hem, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, Savvis Corporation, SingTel, Telefonica, and US Cellular. A Software Magazine 500 company, InfoVista stock is traded on the NASDAQ (IVTA) and on Eurolist by Euronext (FR0004031649). For more information about the company, please visit www.infovista.com.