IT INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS

While financial analysis of IT provides valuable insight into operational efficiency, our analytics go beyond the budget to understand and compare IT's efficiency and effectiveness, enabling IT to demonstrate value to the business, leverage external markets and reduce costs. Helping  IT organizations identify and assess IT cost and performance levels against peers.

Understanding the key issues you are facing:

Modernization and consolidation. Modernization and consolidation projects offer the opportunity to assess financial goals, as well as control costs while staying competitive. We establish baseline costs, evaluating scenario options and continuous measurement to ensure success.

Cloud computing is impacting business operations. You need a framework to evaluate current and future-state goals. We help utilize a road map to analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of the strategy.

Virtualization. The technologies/techniques that make cloud viable are already making internal infrastructures more efficient and effective. We help identify your relative level of virtualization and provide comparative data for understanding the impact of decisions to implement it.

IT service portfolio looks at services in business terms, specifying what they are, how they are bundled and their benefits. Product-, process- and platform-neutral, it is an important communication and relationship management tool.

IT service catalog decomposes services into specific offerings, including chargeback methods, pricing, service-level options, limitations/exclusions and escalation commitments. Service portfolio and catalog comprise a steppingstone for the I&O organization to evaluate its cloud opportunities.

Networking. Enterprises have become more dependent on networks to conduct business, making stability a necessity; as spending increases, so does the difficulty of managing these networks. Our benchmarks cover wired and wireless networks in WAN, LAN, MAN, Internet, VoIP, local and long-distance voice.

For more details visit us @http://www.urssystems.com

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OPENING THE WAY TO NEW REVENUE SOURCES AND BETTER NETWORK MONETIZATION WITH OSS / BSS TOOLS

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is currently a widely discussed topic in the telecommunications industry. There are high expectations regarding the technology, including reducing network maintenance costs and unleashing innovation, thus opening the way to new revenue sources and better network monetization. SDN is a concept where the main principle is to separate the control plane from the data plane, and to move the controller function out from today’s routers.

At first this definition does not sound very exciting, but placing the controller function centrally should enable much more “intelligent” network traffic control and, as a result, efficiently deliver new, innovative services for customers. The problem is that for now SDN is still only a concept, and currently the only tangible specification is OpenFlow, but it only defines the protocol between a controller and a switch.

To make the promises of SDN technology come true, there is a need for a platform, enabling a business application that will help opening up telecom networks. The specifications and APIs for this kind of a business application need to be defined to shape the network according to what is required and make it “smarter”. In order for the latter to happen,  a controller needs a comprehensive end-to-end view of the network and all connected services. However, the SDN concept does not define, how to provide such an end-to-end view.

One idea is to leverage the operators’ existing assets like the BSS/OSS ecosystems and prove that SDN won’t make BSS/OSS investments obsolete. IT architecture, where BSS/OSS investments can not only be saved, but even act as a significant enabler for the SDN “revolution”. This means that telecom operators will be able to provide significant added value to the SDN ecosystem.

The Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is very promising and expected to help operators in reducing costs and boosting service innovation. The cost reduction factor  derives naturally from centralizing the network control functions. Following the Network  Function Virtualization concept, it ensures that the control function can be implemented  on standard equipment (even PCs).

But the real strength of this technology is in its potential to speed up innovation and open up the network. The “smartness” of the SDN controllers comes from the ability to access a complete end-to-end view of the network. Instead of implementing a completely new infrastructure for an SDN controller, the end-to-end view can be delivered by the existing BSS/OSS systems.

For more details visit us @ http://www.urssystems.com

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Transforming Business Performance: As important as the network is, the applications running atop that network are even more important

Businesses are rapidly adopting virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications broadly across the enterprise to minimize costs and enable seamless collaboration and communication. This is significantly straining the traditional network paradigm. IT organizations globally are faced with the challenge to transform network architectures to deliver the right performance and reliability cost-effectively while retaining control.

Market forces driving change include:

• Decreasing cost and increasing reliability of Internet infrastructure 

• Growing diversity of applications, data, and devices across all networks

• Accelerated adoption of private and public cloud computing infrastructure

In a world combining public and private resources, the network itself needs to get hybrid, combining the strengths of the highly reliable Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks with the ubiquity and lower cost of Internet infrastructure. However, change towards more complex network architectures requires planning.

Top 3 IT considerations:

• Identify and Prioritize Applications: Identify, prioritize, and optimize applications to deliver the best performance. Understand application criticality by business, usage patterns and trends, and bandwidth consumption. Understand the current network delivery path and define the optimal delivery path in a Hybrid Network architecture — whether the internal Ethernet network, the wide- area MPLS network, a virtual private network or a hybrid cloud network.

• Define and Establish SLAs for Users and Businesses: Collaborate with line of business owners to identify, define, and establish right application-level Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure the right performance, reliability, and disaster recovery required for the target end users and business processes. This will influence network policies, network architecture design, and network capacity planning in relation to the cost.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Performance Management: Implement new or augment existing tools to gain application level and network visibility for real time performance monitoring to aid in troubleshooting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

In aggregate, the network is more complex than ever before with the addition of hybrid networks that

incorporate the public Internet infrastructure as a way to scale corporate bandwidth cost-effectively. Supporting this architectural transformation requires IT to not only adopt new capabilities but to also

re-evaluate the existing infrastructure design, deployment, and management to maximize the utilization of hybrid resources. This perspective focuses primarily on the results of the technology like performance, reliability, and user productivity. As important as the network is, even more important are the applications running atop that network.

URS Systems also helps IT analyze the enterprise ecosystem across all network links and applications, whether extending to cloud systems or branch offices. It can analyze the most important applications affecting users and IT, from Microsoft productivity applications to accelerating applications in virtualized data centers running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

For more visit us @www.urssystems.com

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