Elanti Service Management System
Letting customers manage their own IP VPN services
The Elanti Service Management System (ESMS) is a management system for IP VPN services. It offers service providers and their customers, total visibility and control of their VPN services.
The Elanti Service Management System is unique in focusing on the requirements of both the customer and the service provider. It takes capabilities that were once solely in the domain of the service provider and extends them to the VPN customer. It enables service providers to differentiate themselves and deliver value to their customers. It helps them meet their Service Level Agreement (SLA) obligations efficiently and effectively while allowing customers to configure and manage their own VPN service requirements.
The core applications of the Elanti Service Management Solution are:
- Service Visualization Application – delivers a graphical service visualization that provides both service providers and their customers with a consolidated view of their VPN service. Customers can extend their VPN service view by including their own IT and network applications to allow true end-to-end service visualization.
- Service Assurance Application - enables service providers and their customers to automate pro-active testing of all service elements. Tests are defined at the business application level, without the need to identify underlying elements. A policy based notification mechanism ensures an event triggered notification (e.g. service level degradation, service outage, etc.) reaches relevant end-users.
- Service Level Control Application – delivers customer driven, on-demand quality management of VPN services. Customers can dynamically manage the quality of their VPN services in real-time. Service level changes and priorities are applied at the business application level without the need to drill down to the various network elements.
Benefits of the Elanti Service Management System
Developed specifically for the IP VPN Service Provider, the Elanti Service Management System enables the service provider to increase profitability and customer satisfaction by maximizing revenue and lowering costs. It complements existing Operational Support Systems (OSS) by capitalizing on the value of the available data which the service provider uses to exceed customer expectations when delivering VPN services as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Customer configuration and management of services
The Elanti Service Management System is end-to-end service oriented and brings all of the service elements together into the one space ensuring the service provider can meet its customers’ changing service needs efficiently and effectively.
Globally accessing VPN services
The Elanti Service Management System is a web-based system that allows end-users to manage their VPN services quickly and easily whenever they need to, and wherever they are.
Reducing costs
Sharing of common resources between multiple VPN customers reduces the total deployment cost to the service provider.
Improving customer satisfaction
The Elanti Service Management System is common to both the customer and the service provider, describing all service elements. Both the customer and service provider have access to the same service model and can visualize and control the complete end-to-end environment in real-time ensuring the customer’s changing needs and SLA requirements are met at all times. This real-time service management differentiates the service provider by allowing customers to manage their services and receive quality of service.
Managing multiple customer requirements
In providing a virtual private network, which shares a common infrastructure, service providers are faced with the challenging problem of managing multiple customer services within the same physical environment. To achieve this, service providers must be “VPN-aware”. The Elanti Service Management System is “VPN-aware”, and therefore integrates with the VPN service efficiently and seamlessly. This gives customers the ability to “reach into” and control their service in an unprecedented manner, whilst protecting the integrity and security of other customer services at all times.
Scaling for different services and growth
The Elanti Service Management System architecture is fully scalable and meets the requirements of both small and large network services providers, whether that is simple network-only services or complex value-added products and services.
Elanti Service Management System Architecture
The Elanti Service Management System is based on a modular architecture that fully decouples application layer from data layer. This allows for the easy enhancement and customization of existing and new applications without impacting any existing functionality. The Elanti Service Management System takes full advantage of all available and relevant service and network data. It hinges on supplementing the service provider network and services data with the data of each VPN customer. Elanti’s technology ensures an accurate real time representation of each VPN customer’s end-to-end network and service topology without the need to regenerate any data already available in the service provider’s operational support systems.
The architecture, shown in this diagram, demonstrates how applications, middleware layer and service agents interact.
Service Visualization Application
The Service Visualization Application provides IP VPN customers with a single consolidated view of their network and IT systems. The application front-end is a Java applet running in the end-user’s browser. The applet communicates directly with the Visualization back-end application exchanging control messages, topology and state information, which it then uses to generate the graphical service view. This “thin-client” approach is very efficient, and large or complex views can be rendered in sub-second times.
Service Assurance Application
The Service Assurance Application provides powerful testing of network and IT systems. This application uses the Service Visualization application as the presentation front-end. The Service Assurance back-end application consists of a collection of distributed agents, for each customer VPN. To keep the total “box-count” to a minimum and significantly reduce deployment costs the agents are deployed within a sophisticated virtualization framework that allows multiple agents to be deployed within a single physical server.
Service Level Control Application
The Service Level Control Application provides a simple mechanism for real-time configuration of service quality. This application also uses the Service Visualization application as the presentation front-end.
Notification Application
The Notification Application is a centralized policy-driven notification service that ensures failure conditions alerts and other events in the environment, as defined by the end customer, are notified in a timely and effective manner ensuring SLA real-time monitoring.
Service Management Middleware
The Service Management Middleware provides a single point of integration between the Elanti Service Management System and is a flexible middleware services layer that couples the application components together and provides dynamic and configurable integration with external OSS and business-oriented customer IT systems. This enables a single, seamless view from the customer’s business applications to the core of the VPN service.
The Service Management Middleware transforms service data into the information on which the Service Management System operates.
This component uniquely enables a single, business-focused view of the customer’s environment by transforming complex technical and business-operational information from multiple sources, into a single, customer-centric view of the customer’s environment.
A business-oriented view of the customer’s environment is sourced directly from the customer It includes:
- Detailed information from the corporate customer about business-critical application services in its environment which are highly dependent on the IP network (such as email servers; electronic trading platforms; or voice over IP services).
- Information about how applications are run and configured, and the configuration of the platforms on which they run.
This information is merged with a full and detailed view of the underlying services components and features available from the service provider. It contains comprehensive element and network configuration data collected from multiple operational support systems.
This merged view gives the service provider unprecedented insight into how the customer’s business is affected by their VPN service.
It also enables the customer to understand their VPN service at the business application level, and allows the customer to see clearly how their business is supported or affected by the service.
Open Standards, Service Oriented Architecture
This single view (or “data abstraction”) is based on the open standard Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) which is used to model all of the service elements.
Each of the service applications are implemented within a distributed services oriented architecture based on Java J2EE technologies and an open standard data abstraction (the Common Information Model, or CIM).
The applications are accessed by corporate customers and service providers through a common web portal.
Summary
The Elanti Service Management System gives customers full visibility of and control over their VPN services. It offers service providers a totally new revenue stream whilst reducing customer churn through allowing both the service providers and their VPN customers to improve service levels and reduce operational costs.