VON Europe: Creanord Addresses Ethernet Services SLAs

| June 14, 2007 | Business Telecom Services - Europe | Show Update

Analyst: Bernt Ostergaard

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: Very High
Market Impact: Moderate

Event Summary

June 12, 2007 -- Creanord Ltd. is assisting service providers in quality of experience metrics and customer loyalty, and the company announced the availability of its EchoVault 2.1, introducing the industry's first centralized and fully automated solution to deploy carrier-grade Ethernet services bundled with SLAs that meet enterprise customer expectations.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Creanord's announcement regarding EchoVault 2.1, because it introduces a centralized and fully automated solution to deploy carrier-grade Ethernet services bundled with SLAs that meet enterprise customer expectations. Furthermore, WAN Ethernet is a fast-growing market with an SLA challenge, and the EchoVault suite focuses on deriving KQIs (key quality indicators) from KPI (key performance indicator) metrics. Thus, service providers can shift their SLAs in the direction of business fulfilment.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Creanord, which is struggling to get traction with its EchoVault SLA product suite in a market dominated by big vendors such as IBM, HP and BMC and infrastructure management specialists such as Compuware. The unique selling point is the focus on reflecting user experience with the application.

• Market Impact: Moderate on the European business telecom market, specifically large telco service providers, because here the focus is on in-house development of their customer portals. However, Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers may team up with Creanord to deliver SLAs that more closely align with customer experience.

Competitive Positives

• Defining SLAs for WAN Ethernet services is a fast-developing focus area, attracting significant service provider attention. Creanord has a product suite focused on user experience of performance, which sits well with the enterprise customers.

• Enterprise customers are realigning their telecom strategies with a focus on the performance of business-critical enterprise applications. They are looking for SLAs that reflect this. The Creanord approach will provide service providers with better tools to develop such metrics.

• Service providers know that the network centric SLAs are losing power as a marketing tool. They know they have to develop SLAs that reflect user experience more. Creanord can help them automate this task.

Competitive Concerns

• Service level management and quality assurance are core functions of infrastructure management suites such as Compuware, BMC and Tivoli that will appeal to customers looking for a complete solution. Creanord cannot deliver all the necessary components for a complete solution.

• To deliver convincing application SLA metrics, Creanord needs to get buy-in from the application development community, to ensure that chosen metrics actually reflect application performance. Likewise, the service provider using this tool will need business partners for end-to-end performance monitoring.

• Being able to identify where an error occurs is not the same as fixing the problem. Service providers deploying the Creanord SLA suite will have to provide solutions for fixing the problems from the desktop to the data centre or risk losing their position to bigger, more comprehensive players.

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