Marconi Boosts Global Carrier Support With New UK-Based Network Operations Center - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, May 29, 2000

Marconi (LONDON: MNI), a global provider of advanced communications solutions and support services, Tuesday unveiled a purpose-built secure Network Operations Center (NOC) as part of a worldwide support strategy designed to give network operators greatly reduced operational control costs and improved efficiencies.

The new center, based in Liverpool, will provide European telecommunications operators and service providers with round-the-clock, seven day-a-week control and management of their networks, through leading edge diagnostic and control equipment operated by a dedicated team of highly trained telecommunications professionals. It forms part of a new worldwide network of NOCs, which already includes a new center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and will soon incorporate centers in Germany, Australia and Italy.

Designed to proactively detect and prevent faults before they impact on network performance, the new center frees telcos from the burden of managing today's increasingly complex networks. With network control and management estimated to account for as much as 40% of operators costs, Marconi's new NOC will help operators save as much as 50% over the cost of managing their network using in-house resources.

"Today's multi-vendor, multi-service networks are becoming increasingly difficult to manage because of the sheer complexity of the equipment involved," said Neil Sutcliffe, CEO, Marconi Services. "For operators, this can translate into major headaches, in terms of both overhead costs and the difficulty of locating the right expertise to get the job done."

In taking the decision to develop the new NOC, Sutcliffe said Marconi traded on a long and successful history of helping operators optimize the performance of their networks through 11 Technical Assistance Centers worldwide. "Marconi's global presence means we've worked with the leading telcos in countries all around the world. This gives our technical engineers an unrivalled experience supporting not only our own equipment, but a huge range of products from all the major vendors."

The Liverpool NOC will initially focus on management of Marconi's best- selling System X switches. Support for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) equipment will be added in September, with management of the full range of Marconi Communications' products, including voice over-IP and packet radio systems, integrated by the end of the year. Marconi will also provide capability to manage multi-vendor network solutions.

The new center is equipped with best-in-class network management and performance analysis systems, which incorporate early warning alerts to enable technicians to detect potential faults before they affect quality of service on the network. The systems will deliver the most advanced network control functionality available, including real-time event monitoring and Web-based performance management, allowing customers to review the status of their networks at any time directly over the Internet. A trouble-ticketing feature will also generate alerts to specialized engineers, with automatic escalation of alert messages to increasingly senior staff after a pre-set delay, to guarantee a maximum level of responsiveness.

A team of engineers and support staff working in shifts around the clock will provide NOC customers with direct, 24-hour support, proactively monitoring traffic flows across their networks and responding immediately to equipment faults or traffic overloads on high volume routes. Each network management engineer can monitor up to four customer networks simultaneously from his or her console and, in the case of a serious problem, can move the display of graphical data on any of their networks to a bank of large monitors at the front of the center to facilitate input from other team members.

Neil Sutcliffe said the new facility has already generated enormous interest from existing Marconi customers, many of whom have expressed their intention to move their network control operations to the NOC when it is fully operational later this year. "When we designed the Liverpool NOC, we chose a fully-scalable, modular design that would enable us to expand our customer handling capability according to demand," he said. "With many telcos and alternative network operators already keen to come on board, we're also now looking at opportunities in enterprise network and transport network management."

Sutcliffe said Marconi also sees an opportunity to act as a part-time manager for larger telcos, which may already have their own management centers, by taking over night-time and weekend monitoring or providing stand- by or backup facilities. "We see enormous demand out there for this kind of service, which meets the needs of established operators looking to re-engineer their operations to make them dynamic and more cost-effective, and fledgling operators who want to take advantage of the enormous opportunities in today's telecoms markets."