SevOne Readies for Wireless Backhaul Track at ITEXPO

SevOne Inc., a provider of an application-aware network performance management solution, has seen a lot of change in the market since the company was founded in 2005, particularly the convergence of video, voice and data over the past year.

This convergence is “driving a fundamental change in the way organizations manage the delivery of key business services, for both enterprises and for managed service providers,” according to Pete Cruz, senior director of product management and marketing for SevOne.

As SevOne gears up for ITEXPO West 2011, the event that has been dubbed the largest communications and technology event of the year, Cruz sat down with TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani to discuss predictions for the market, how the cloud has influenced SevOne’s development cycle and what SevOne hopes to take away from ITEXPO.

ITEXPO West, taking place from Sept. 13-15 in Austin, Texas, brings together thousands of people from within the communications and technology communities who gather with enterprises, SMBs and other end users to build their businesses and gain knowledge for the future at ITEXPO.

Take a look at the full interview below.

How has your market evolved over the past year and what trends have fueled those changes?

The proliferation of all the various data-enabled devices (PDA, smartphones, Netbooks, laptops, and tablet PCs ) is significantly increasing the load on wireless networks and the Ethernet backhaul networks handling this increased traffic. Mobile backhaul upgrades using Ethernet technology are accelerating as data traffic grows, and these technology upgrades (such as Ethernet backhaul, HSPA and LTE, and IMS) has accounted for the strong performance in the performance monitoring market.

These market drivers, network convergence and mobile video, require new levels of performance visibility and reporting to provide more effective performance management and service delivery assurance.

What do you see as the next disruptive force in technology and how will it impact your market or business?

As mentioned above, LTE and IMS over the past nine months has driven significant growth for SevOne. SevOne has benefited by gaining early entrance into new and rapidly growing 4G LTE and IMS technology roll-outs.

SevOne is already engaged with several key mobile operators and MSO backhaul providers to deliver the complete and immediate performance visibility these providers need to deliver on the service expectations these new technologies promise.

How has the acceptance and adoption of the cloud model influenced your development cycle and process?

There are really two ways to answer this question: first as an ISV, SevOne has leveraged Agile development methods to be able to deliver our software in an almost SaaS model. This allows us to deliver key capabilities to our costumers quicker than our competitors, which is in line with our customer expectations for rapid innovation and deployment. The cloud model has certainly changed the level of expectation for how fast new features are introduced and used.

Second, the cloud adoption cycle has create new performance management challenges to provide complete and immediate visibility for cloud providers to ensure that the infrastructure or cloud service they are delivering is meeting customers’ expectations in regards to performance and reliability. SevOne has many MSP customers that leverage our solution as key part of their cloud offerings.

What is the most common request you are seeing from your customers? How is your company addressing these demands?

Our most common request is to continue to add performance dates from more sources. Advancements and growth in LTE rollouts is driving multi-vendor environments with often proprietary interfaces for controlling or managing key network elements. Our customers need a unified and consistent way to monitor performance to gain complete and immediate visibility to enable them to: effectively manage and optimize network capacity while reducing LTE, backhaul, and IMS expenditure and customer churn; proactively monitor network performance to ensure the infrastructure at all points meets current service level agreements and addresses future demands; optimize 4G LTE and IMS infrastructure to support increased multi-media traffic levels, markets and geographies; and isolate, determine, and alert on performance issues ahead of service impact to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.

SevOne has developed an innovated approach to collecting third-party performance metrics via our xStats plug-in that complements our marketing leading 10-day guarantee for new device (SNMP) support. 

SevOne is working with leading mobile operators to implement the collection of bulk performance statistics via our new SevOne xStats Plug-in from the element management systems of their LTE, Backhaul, and IMS equipment providers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Bridgewater, Cisco (Starent), Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Samsung, as well as probe-based synthetic test systems such as EXFO/Brix Networks.

Besides phone calls, mobile is now sharing bandwidth with video and machines. What do you predict will be the mix of traffic in the future?

I see that video will be the predominant consumer of mobile bandwidth driving (according to Cisco and other analysts) approximately 93 percent of mobile traffic by 2014. Many businesses are turning to video as the way to communicate with employees and customers. Integrated or unified communication, video conferencing, YouTube marketing and training videos, etc. are some examples.

What are you most looking forward to at ITEXPO West  in Austin? What do you see as being the biggest trends at the show?

I am looking forward to having compelling discussions on attendees’ key projects and initiatives and where SevOne can add value by providing visibility into the performance and quality of the service before, during and after the project rollout, and ultimately the end user quality of experience.

As for biggest trends – the impact of mobility for providers and consumers along with convergence of voice, video and data.

What issues will you be addressing during your ITEXPO session and why should attendees be sure to attend?

As part of the “Wireless Backhaul Track - The Measure of Experience,” I will be joining Russ Green, senior vice president of marketing -VPI Systems, to discuss facing the realities of end to end experiences from the subscribers’ perspective, and that no one system gives complete insight as to what impacts the consumers see.

The answer for the complex problem is to go beyond the smoke stack of radio, transport and processing. Carriers are learning to put systems in place that measure the experience beyond the systems. Our session looks at how the experience is managed, monitored and maintained.

To find out more about SevOne, visit the company at ITEXPO West 2011. To be held Sept. 13-15 in Austin, TX,  ITEXPO is the world’s premier IP communications event. Visit SevOne in booth No. 1513. Don’t wait. Register now. 

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