The Pot of Gold at the End of the Network
Along with a thawing of the ground, March brought St Patrick’s day, a traditional Irish day of festivity in which everything Irish is celebrated. It’s also a great excuse to make green cookies and for the kids to dress up as leprechauns wearing shamrocks. In Irish mythology leprechauns are mischievous characters who love to play practical jokes, and keep a pot of gold hidden at the end of the rainbow. It takes a shrewd person to trick a leprechaun into giving up his gold. The search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has become a popular way of describing the search for wealth and reward at the end of a journey. In the world of network management there are rainbows everywhere, since networks are often full of stranded or underutilized assets at the far edges of the network. Assets that are of great value, but hidden from view. The assets are hidden because they have been moved or not properly registered in inventory or Fixed Asset registers, and so they have become unusable since no one knows where they are. The knock effects of this are felt throughout a service provider.
Finance
Don’t know the value of assets in the network so cannot provide accurate financial statements
Marketing and Sales
Don’t know what services the network can support or predict the cost will be for implementing new services
Network Management
Can’t manage the network optimally because assets cannot be re-purposed to augment network hotspots
Order drop out from inconsistent and unreliable records
These challenges not only affect the individual functional areas, but can result in open warfare between the groups. Network managers feel they must request ever bigger budgets to compensate for the extra demands being put on the network by new marketing initiatives, and finance fear they are being asked to throw money into a black hole with no possibility of understanding the return on investment. Without cross functional visibility of the companies network assets then suspicion and mistrust can develop between groups, which can cripple a company. Finance need to know if the assets they are purchasing are providing value to money, and marketing need to know if they can confidentially sell new services that will bring in extra revenue. Network managers want to know how they can provide the service required with ever tighter budgets.
By utilizing automated network discovery network managers could re-build, or even create, an inventory that would give them a true picture of what was available in the network. A network discovery tool that could also understand how those assets were being utilized, which services were running on them, and how the network was connected together, could provide a way to optimally utilize every asset to provide a robust network for the least possible cost. When combined with an asset tracking and life cycle management tool such as Subex ROC AA then network discovery can give unprecedented level of visibility of where assets are located, how they are being used and what value they are bringing to the company. ROC AA with network discovery can uncover the pot of gold hidden at the end of your network.
Mark Jenkins has worked in the IT industry for over 15 years as a BI and Analytics consultant, and more recently as ROC Product Manager for Subex Ltd. He has designed and deployed solutions for global companies in many sectors including Insurance, utilities and telecommunications. Mark holds a BSc Hons in Computer Science from Manchester University (UK).
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