VistaMart®Integrations

VistaPortal®

InfoVistaServers

Dynamic Report Groups byService, Business Unit,

Location, Customer

Planning,Management,

Operations,Service Desk,Portal Views

Real-time andAggregated

Reports

Consolidationand Aggregation

3rd PartyFault/Event

Management

InfoVista Performance Management Platform for Cable MSOs

AutomatedDiscovery and

Report Provisioning

Real-TimeService Level

Violations

Real-TimeAnalysisKPI/KQI

VoIP, VoD,AAA, Servers CMTS

Proven Solutions for Proactive Service Assurance

Residential Triple Play and Business Telecom Solutions offered by Cable MSOs are enabled by a complex mix of network, system and application infrastructure. These services are also highly bandwidth intensive and performance sensitive. Most end users – residential and business – have viable service options available from their traditional telecom service providers, and have become increasingly demanding when it comes to quality of experience (QoE) expectations. The delivery of superior quality of customer and service experience is the biggest differentiating factor for all types of service providers. This is especially true for the rollout and adoption of rich multimedia residential applications such as interactive IPTV, VoD, VoIP, Video IM, web-like TV and business services such as Carrier Ethernet and application-centric business services.

Like traditional Communication Service Providers (CSPs), Cable MSOs need proactive service assurance solutions to be successful with their triple play and commercial business broadband go-to-market strategies. This is the only sure way to handle the forecasted subscriber growth and meet the desired service performance metrics. InfoVista’s market leading solutions offer the management data and insights to develop the best quality of service experience for both residential and business customer segments.

Key Performance Management Challenges Faced by Cable MSOs

As Cable MSOs have expanded from analog and digital video services to offer IP-based services, they have added a wide range of infrastructure elements, components, equipment, and complexity. This rapid growth and increasing complexity of the Cable MSO service portfolio has led to an explosion in data traffic demand and a new set of performance management challenges:

Significantly larger number of devices and applications to be ffmanaged

Strain on bandwidth utilization and management in the core, ffaccess and distribution networks

Evolving and optimizing HSD, VoIP, Digital Video and ffintegrated wireless network service delivery and assurance

Superior service delivery and in-depth SLA management for ffbusiness services such as Carrier Ethernet and managed or hosted applications

Enhanced quality of service (QoS) and Quality of Experience ff(QoE) for all customer segments

InfoVista Solution for

Cable MSOsEnabling Proactive Service Assurance of Residential Triple Play, Business and Mobile Backhaul Infrastructure and Applications

Proactive Service Assurance and Management for Cable MSO Infrastructure and Applications

Proactive Service Assurance is a critical component of the overall service management operational support systems (OSS) architecture. Proactive service assurance and performance management play a crucial role in helping CSPs and Cable MSOs perform some of the very important functions in managing complex end-user services:

Proactive monitoring and troubleshooting of network and IT issues before they ffcreate service impacts

Accelerated problem resolution based on a combination of historical and real time data ff

Capacity planning and reporting to help make intelligent, cost effective technology ffand financial decisions

Enhanced Service Level Agreements (SLA) and customer reporting that provide ffin-depth visibility into service quality and performance metrics.

Delivering the highest quality of service and experience is essential if Cable MSOs are to attract and retain customers. In the residential market, poor quality in any one service can mean a lost customer for the entire triple-play bundle. In the commercial market QoS is mission critical – prioritizing delivery of application and business services over the network. Business customers, therefore, expect their service provider to offer carrier-class service as well as guarantee performance and reliability through end-to-end SLAs. They also expect sophisticated customer reporting that provides visibility on SLA compliance. Service level visibility is also essential to capitalize on the cellular market’s demand for backhaul support between cell towers, base stations and switches.

Given the high expectations on service level delivery – operations and engineering teams need all the necessary tools at their disposal to ensure the best possible quality of experience. InfoVista’s flagship service assurance product, VistaInsight® for Networks - Service Provider edition, and other complementary solutions such as VistaInsight for Servers, and VistaInsight for IP Telephony, offer the leading edge performance management capability to meet the demands of next generation services.

InfoVista’s Solution for Cable MSOs Offers …

Proactive Service Assurance with an End-to-End View

When data exits in different silos, it is costly to access, organize and assess in the proper context. InfoVista solutions provide top-down visibility from end user applications to service delivery systems to last mile access and core network infrastructure. Our service-centric, cross-silo approach to performance management contributes to effective problem resolution and assures superior quality of experience for both residential and

business customer segments. InfoVista empowers Cable MSOs to adopt and leverage the same best-of-breed performance management solution being used by hundreds of leading CSPs around the world including more than 80 of the top 100.

Comprehensive Visibility into Any Vendor CMTS/Cable Modem Performance and Capacity

VistaInsight for Networks provides DOCSIS-compliant discovery, monitoring and reporting on the performance of CMTS routers and the cable modems they support. It supports seamless discovery and data collection from cable network related objects including CMTS, cable modems, and interfaces according to DOCSIS IF MIB (RFC 2620). It also provides real-time reporting that abstracts the volume of data into meaningful and actionable intelligence.

What is Proactive Service Assurance and Management ?

Cable MSOs can view the performance of CMTSs to proactively manage the operations of their end-to-end services.

Solution Components at a Glance

VistaInsight for Networks (VIN)ff enables Cable MSOs to automatically collect, analyze and present performance data for all of the heterogeneous devices, technologies and elements on their network on both an individual and a service-centric basis.

VistaInsight for Servers (VIS)ff allows Cable MSOs to automatically discover, collect and store performance information from the full range of application and user / service authentication servers in their environment using an agent-agnostic approach.

VistaInsight for IP Telephony (VIIPT)ff automatically discovers, collects and analyzes performance data on resources required for IP Telephony: call management applications, servers, gateways, underlying network resources, and subscribed services.

Detailed Real-Time Reports on Crucial Performance Metrics and KPIs

Availability and generation of detailed, real-time reports for proactively identifying and resolving service impacting issues is crucial for today’s service providers. In addition to the standard key performance indicators (KPIs) such as availability, load, traffic, and saturation, InfoVista’s performance management solutions also provide Cable MSO specific interface metrics and KPIs. These include number of active/registered cable modems, modulation, frequency, signal noise ratio, and more. Visibility into utilization per channel, per interface metrics that are ideally suited for oversubscription and capacity management are also readily made available through our user friendly portal. Reporting of CMTS level metrics covers device CPU, buffer, memory, and saturation thresholds.

True Evolution from “Reactive” to “Proactive” Service Monitoring and Management

Dashboard views and detailed real-time reports enable proactive capacity management and predictive troubleshooting by measuring platform metrics, statistics on network core interfaces, and the performance of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) interfaces by channel. Management by exception rather than solely relying on management reports allow Cable MSOs to set thresholds for KPI metrics. When the performance levels breach thresholds and associated business rules, the system can proactively alert the operations staff. This brings the operator the most relevant near real-time information related to service performance and quality, avoiding costly interruptions in the future.

Enhanced OSS Interoperability and Automation to Streamline Business Service Operations

InfoVista solutions provide superior management of Carrier Ethernet in the Core and Access networks. Automated configuration of L2/L3 performance reporting is seamlessly achieved during service provisioning and activation of an Ethernet service. The solution provides advanced aggregation and abstraction on a per customer, per service, and per site basis. The advanced reporting enables easy navigation to metrics by customer, service, site, interface, QoS, and much more. Carrier Ethernet service SLAs are crucial for Cable MSO commercial customers (SMBs, Enterprise and Mobile Operators). InfoVista’s solutions proactively monitor service levels and help avoid expensive outages that lead to SLA violations.

Intuitive, End-user and Customer Reporting Portal

Ultimately, any service assurance and management system is as good as its capabilities from an end user and customer reporting perspective. The end users include network / service operations, engineering, capacity planning and management staff in the provider and customer ends. InfoVista’s flexible and easy to use portal interface provides the best-of breed capabilities in this area.

Performance of individual cable modem devices enables organizations to monitor their end user SLAs.

Competitive Differentiators

Best of breed, carrier-class IP performance ffmanagement

Object oriented, real time reporting architectureff

Out of the box multi-vendor CMTS and HFC ffcoverage

Single cross domain platform covering networks, ffdevices, servers and applications

Vendor agnostic, agent-less server and ffapplication management

In-depth Carrier Ethernet, QoS and VoIP expertiseff

Proven scalability in Tier 1 provider environmentsff

Flexibility and interoperability that surpasses ffcable-specific tools

Certified integrations with EMS from leading ffequipment providers

About InfoVista InfoVista empowers telecom operators, services providers and large enterprises to maximize business return and productivity by assuring the optimal performance of mission-critical networked services, applications and infrastructures. Eighty percent of the world’s largest service providers and more than 30 of the top 100 global corporations rely on InfoVista’s proven solutions for Proactive Service Assurance to foresee potential service issues before they impact end users, improve business effectiveness, reduce operating risk, lower cost of operations, increase agility and create competitive advantage. Sample customers include Bell Canada, Bharti, BNP Paribas, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, CitiGroup, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Deutsche Telekom, Fidelity Investments, JP Morgan Chase, SFR, SingTel, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and Telstra. InfoVista is traded on the Euronext Paris (FR0004031649) and can be found online at www.infovista.com.

Copyright 2008 InfoVista S.A. All rights reserved. InfoVista®, Business Technology Intelligence®, VistaBridge®, VistaCockpit®, VistaDiscovery®, VistaFoundation™, VistaInsight®, VistaLink®, VistaMart®, Vista Plug-in®, VistaPortal®, VistaProvisioner®, Vista Troubleshooter®, VistaView®, and Vista Watch® are registered trademarks or trademarks of InfoVista S.A. in the United States and/or other countries.

The information contained in this document is the property of InfoVista S.A. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form (including photocopying or electronic storage on any medium) or by any means or used to make any derivative work (such as translation, transformation or adaptation) without the express written permission of InfoVista S.A.

The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice and does not carry any contractual obligation for InfoVista. InfoVista reserves the right to make changes to any products or services described in this document at any time without notice. InfoVista shall not be held responsible for the direct or indirect consequences of the use of the information contained in this document.

Contact information

www.infovista.com For sales inquiries please email: sales@infovista.com

World and European Headquarters InfoVista S.A. 6, rue de la Terre de Feu 91952 Courtaboeuf Cedex Les Ulis, France Tel +33 (0) 1 64 86 79 00 Fax +33 (0) 1 64 86 79 79 North American Headquarters InfoVista Corporation 12950 Worldgate Drive Suite 250 Herndon, VA 20170 United States Tel +1 703 435 2435 Fax +1 703 435 5122 Asia-Pacific Headquarters InfoVista (Asia-Pacific) Pte Ltd Block 750C, #03-16/17 Chai Chee Road TechnoPark @ Chai Chee Singapore 469003 Tel +65 6449 7641 Fax +65 6449 3054

As a market leader and innovator we pride ourselves in using the best products the industry has to offer and InfoVista has brought us best-in-class service assurance solutions. The flexibility of InfoVista allows us to certify the quality of service before we launch new services and to keep up with capacity requirements in the network. We welcome our partnership with InfoVista in terms of focus, capabilities and packaging to meet the needs of our industry.

Martin Kull – CTO, ComHem, the largest Swedish Cable MSO.