If you're deriving more revenue from business customers, striving to grow from an ISP to an MSP, network monitoring is the foundation of many of the services you wish to offer.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 24, 2006]

As ISPs drive to derive great Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), each company is competing to offer new services. In addition, companies aim to become a trusted advisor to the business customer, playing the role of a Value Added Reseller (VAR).

It starts with network monitoring, and Jamie Lerner, president and CEO of San Francisco, Calif.-based CITTIO, says ISPs should look to his company because of its background. "We were an MSP. We sell out technology to ISPs and MSPs because that's the world we came from. We built our technology while running a data canter," he says.

"When people use our software, they can tell it was built by data center operators for data center operators. We're not just selling software; we're selling a business models, with tools to sell the service and to differentiate the ISP from its competition," he adds.

CITTIO's WatchTower product is a comprehensive monitoring solution. "Service providers can use it for anything from simple break and fix service to full service multi location monitoring for a retail organization," says Lerner. "They can use it to assess their own VoIP service, to monitor ongoing QoS. They can use it to see when they need hardware upgrades."

The key idea is that the service provider should be selling more services. "ISPs need to upsell from commodity data center space (doing so also helps their resellers)," says Lerner. "They need to upsell from colocation to MSP. They need to derive higher margins and provide stickier services. A service provider can provide a quality service at a lower cost than the individual business because the service provider can realize economies of scale."

(This reminds us of an article written by John McKown of Delaware.net and posted on his own website, Server Colocation VS. Managed Servers, in which he argues that colocation is a commodity product and difficult to manage, whereas managed services benefit both the service provider and the customer.)

Lerner says that a trusted service provider will eventually be asked to help with security. "We're seeing a trend where companies are asking traditional data center folks to monitor things outside the data center. When a company says, 'what I want now is for you to take care of it for me,' the service provider wants to be able to say, 'sure, don't worry about it,' instead of filling a contract with all sorts of conditions."

Before you agree to anything, however, make sure you know what you're committing to. "Some ISPs are now doing a network assessment before they sign a deal," says Lerner .

What WatchTower does
One of WatchTower's features is an automatic network assessment. "We can find what's there and how it's performing," says Lerner .

Other WatchTower features include:

• The software is web-based and supports third party integration and branding
• Supports SNMP system monitoring
• Can deliver alerts via e-mail, pager, and SMS
• Includes a document management system to help the service provider standardize procedures
• Provides historical data and analysis tools
• A calendar enables scheduling of outages and also allows alerts to be sent to key personnel to remind them of their schedule
• Alerts can be routed by skill set
• An executive dashboard tracks such key data as worst performers, SLAs, and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)

Lerner says service providers need to track a lot of information. "While a large corporation might monitor 1,000 servers, an MSP could be handling 30,000 servers. Many MSPs monitor bigger networks than the average Fortune 500 company," he says.

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Finger Lakes
Paul Griswold is president and CEO of Victor, N.Y.-based Finger Lakes Technology Group (FLTG), is using WatchTower to track the company's all-Cisco VoIP offering.

FLTG has a long history dating back to the founding of its parent company, the local ILEC, the Ontario & Traumansburg Telephone Companies.

FLTG has many phone system monitoring contracts inherited from the ILEC. "We used to be reactive," says Griswold. "Now, with IP telephony, if a part of the network goes down, we need to know immediately and we need to know what happened."

In the past, FLTG had phone maintenance contracts and customers managed their own data networks. Now, with convergence, FLTG is monitoring the entire converged network.

"If the problem is 50 miles from their main operations center, we can go to the web portal and see what the problem is," Griswold says. "We're now proactive. We cannot sell phone maintenance any longer, but we can sell monitoring. Our monitoring allows the customer to avoid increasing their labor force to manage the converged network. Because of us, they don't have to."

For most customers, Griswold says, the monitoring is handled from FLTG's NOC, but not for all. "Banks are a little different," he says. "We have to be on the right side of the firewall for customers like banks."

WatchTower saves FLTG labor two. Whereas in the past, inventory required off site travel, that's no longer the case. "The CITTIO product rediscovers the network, tells me what code version every Cisco box is using. I don't even need to maintain a live asset database. I just do live discovery. Customers like it that we have live data."

"The default," :Lerner says, "is that WatchTower re-scans the network every 24 hours to find what's there and which software version it's using. It does automatically what used to be done manually, and used to be done less often."

Lerner likes to describe CITTIO's customers as partners, in part because of the volume of market research his company provides. Griswold says FLTG used CITTIO guidance for pricing and also did its own market research. "We talked to our market peers and held a focus group with thirteen key corporate customers. We found the customers wanted more. One key headache was that the code kept being out of date."

WatchTower solved that problem.

The tower's future
Lerner says the company plans to add features to WatchTower in three key areas:

1) CITTIO is working on what it calls "multi-tenancy." Customers want access to their data on WatchTower but want to know that no other companies will have access to their data. "People are getting used to self service in banks," Lerner says. "They're used to using ATMs instead of bank tellers. The same thing is happening in managed services."

2) CITTIO is working on what it calls "visualization." Once they can access their equipment data on WatchTower, customers will want to see where it is. WatchTower will provide an organization tree that shows how the equipment is connected and also will show the equipment on a geographical map. "The map feature will be popular with multi-location customers like large retail organizations," says Lerner.

3) CITTIO is increasing its "depth of reporting." Essentially, Lerner's goal is to be able to drill down into the data to find anything a manager could possibly request. "System and monitoring tools have always been guilty of having tons of data but little information," he says.

Pricing and availability
WatchTower is available now. Exact pricing is not available, but Lerner says that the company sells to a service provider at about one-tenth of the retail price.

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