ServicePilot Technologies Talks UC Strategies at ITEXPO East

AT ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2012 in Miami, Fla., ServicePilot Technologies’ vice president of Marketing & NORAM Sales, Ken Spear, interviewed with Erik Linask (News - Alert), editorial director at TMC. Spear discussed ServicePilot’s monitoring solutions for VoIP and unified communications (UC).

ServicePilot Technologies is a premier provider of availability and performance monitoring solutions. Its product familes, ServicePilot ISM and ServicePilot NBA, automate, simplify and accelerate the monitoring, trouble-shooting, reporting, and management of IT services and service level agreements for enterprises and service providers.

ServicePilot customers are typically managed service providers and enterprises who want ensured 100 percent availability, excellent call quality, and consistent performance to their end users.

“When you deal with something like UC, it’s a very complex solution. There are a lot of moving parts. There are applications, databases, the network and servers. So, companies want an all-in-one solution where if there is a problem, they can identify a problem, isolate it and resolve it quickly,” explained Spears.

Customers want a cost-effective implementation strategy whether they want it targeted toward a specific need, or they are trying to roll it out for implementation of VoIP over a period of time. Either way, they want to be able to access these things in an affordable manner.

With the growth of cloud, service levels have become very important because now it’s not something that’s necessarily under the control of IT or one organization.

“You’ve got lots of different organizations delivering lots of services. The end user doesn’t care whether the IT or the service provider is getting that from one source or one vendor, they just want good response time and good call quality,” said Spear. You need tools that are going to allow you to ensure a high level of service so that the end user is getting the performance and the productivity they expect from the services that are being delivered.”

As far as troubleshooting, there are common problems, according to Spear.

 “We have a correlation engine in our product. It can do some things in terms of logic to say, ‘’We can isolate that.’ We can look at where that problem is and we can pinpoint exactly what component is giving you problems or causing degradation,’” he said.

The tool has to be able to pull the information up and provide it to the relevant people who can really go in there and solve it. The tool’s job is to help you from going from reactive to a situation to more proactive in terms of resolving and addressing the problems beforehand.

One of the advantages of ServicePilot’s product is that it offers trend analysis and capacity planning. If you are going to run out of bandwidth or have other constraints that would impact quality, you can anticipate that in advance.

“A tool that will allow you to do all in one and each of those different departments or organizations can look at the world and say ‘I understand it, this is not a case of finger pointing, we don’t have to deal with these vendor or technology silos,’” said Spear. “We can focus on what’s the real problem here and then get the relevant people involved who need to solve it.”