Equant Improves Application Management for Global Enterprises

Equant today unveiled a new set of capabilities that brings full end-to-end application performance management, including application SLAs to its enterprise customers. These new capabilities help ensure customers get the value they expect from their enterprise applications.

Equant's new capabilities -- Application Service Level Agreements, Strategic Network & Application Predictor and Application Performance Analysis Proactive -- complement a broad set of existing application management services and provide the most advanced and complete set of application performance management capabilities available. 

According to Mark Winther, IDC Analyst: "With these new capabilities, Equant offers all the critical pieces to ensure customers make the most of their application investments. They can cover everything from design, planning and implementation, to reporting, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Equant's approach to Application SLA is unique."

Until now, monitoring true end-to-end performance was inefficient because it was only possible using end-user reactive measures. By utilizing Equant's new capabilities, user perception of application performance can be effectively related to network metrics based on synthetic transaction monitoring. Equant can therefore proactively monitor the true performance of applications from a central point and automatically take the appropriate action to diagnose, prevent or correct problems very quickly. 

Optimized network design ensuring the most efficient use of technology and bandwidth needed to support the needs of the applications. Balance of cost and quality.

"We wanted to know that we had provisioned enough bandwidth for all the French locations, or that we were not paying for much more than we actually needed," said Jim Mourilyan, Global Infrastructure Architect for the Cadbury Schweppes Group's IT department. The Application Performance Analysis (APA) management tools were central to providing this assurance.

"Before we ran APA, we had an idea of about 90 percent of the applications on the network, but not how they were used or how they would work together," said Mourilyan. "For example, before we set up prioritization, we thought that out of the Paris office, SAP would be using most of the bandwidth, but we found that it wasn't. Lotus Notes was using up to 80 percent of the available bandwidth and could be affecting how SAP was working."

Application Service Level Agreements -- Equant now has the ability to provide application-level SLAs. Application SLAs are the culmination of our existing application management capabilities and recent developments that simulate application performance from client to server. This industry first is offered as part of an Equant managed service.

Application SLAs strongly link the business requirement with the underlying infrastructure and allow customers to get the full value they expect from their enterprise applications.

Strategic Network & Application Predictor (SN&AP) -- This is a consulting service that enables customers to appropriately map their business requirements to an IT solution.

Application Performance Analysis (APA) Proactive -- APA Proactive feature provides 24x7 monitoring of application performance and provides the earliest possible warning of performance degradation and potential problems with the underlying infrastructure.

Equant's life cycle approach makes use of Equant's various capabilities to ultimately deliver the Application SLA. These capabilities include base-lining and application pre-deployment services that Equant has offered since 2002, and the following new capabilities that are part of the SN&AP consultancy:

Predictive Network Modeling (PNM) -- Assesses the impact of change on the network and makes recommendations for dealing with that impact. Using a model of the customer's network, Equant can predict and evaluate a wide range of scenarios and determine the optimum design and configuration to support business activities including the validation of a target application response time that would be offered as an application-level SLA.

Network Performance Optimization (NPO) -- Offered as a recurring service of SN&AP, NPO utilizes all the data, analysis, and recommendations collected from the one-time SN&AP engagements to provide an appropriate capacity planning and performance envelope in order to validate a target IT solution.

The NPO output is stored into a dashboard that is reviewed annually giving customers an accurate view of current and historical utilizations and performance view of the network and applications.

Equant is a recognized industry leader in global communciations servives for multinaitonal businesses. Equant combines its network expertise with its expanded services capabilities to provide global, integrated and customized communication services to enable its customers' key business processes, Equant serves thousands of the world's top companies, with the industry's most extensice portfolio of communications services and network solutions, including the market-leading IP VPN used by nearly 1,300 global businesses.