The importance of award winning ingredients

Of the many pleasures in life, I take my food and cooking very seriously. Simple recipes made with high quality ingredients are the basis for my Italian cuisine. The importance of quality ingredients also applies to how the market for network services is evolving in Europe, Something that the industry got together to celebrate over dinner at the MEF awards last Friday.

We see customers for our network portfolio falling into two camps. Those who go to the restaurant in need of someone who can serve and cook the recipes they want; and those who want to buy all of the ingredients to make the meal themselves. At the recent WAN Summit panel I was challenged with a customer quandary – with little differentiation in the market around network service ‘ingredients’, it’s difficult to weigh up the benefits of one provider versus another. How do you know which provider is right for your business?

This naturally got me thinking more about what CIOs look for when buying network ingredients. The CIOs at our customer organisations have confirmed that price is not all ; they don’t necessarily want to take the discount store route when selecting network service ingredients. While their budgets remain tightly controlled, CIOs are looking for services that support the delivery of specific business outcomes; pricing is important but it has to be tied to service quality.

When CIOs evaluate ingredients, they do so based on the significance each ingredient plays in the overall service delivery. For example, how important is the service provider’s depth of presence in each geography to the business? Do we need guaranteed performance for a specific application, or is average performance good enough? The service is right but how important is it that a specific branch office has the service in 15 or 90 days?

Some organisations are planning for growth, and some are consolidating operations into new locations that are better suited to serve their markets. The capability to quickly and cost efficiently connect a new branch is as important as being able to turn up a location’s bandwidth for short periods in 24 hours or less. In order to become more responsive to business needs, CIOs are now shopping for services that give them greater operational control, including proactive notification of faults and visibility of performance.

At Colt we serve customers that want to do it themselves, or outsource for the full a la carte experience. Both approaches are valid (indeed as an amateur cook I never dislike a good dinner out). And we’re very proud to have been recognised for the quality of our ingredients at the MEF awards last week.

Below is what we think should be on a checklist when hunting for the best ingredients for WAN reach and speed:

• Look for a provider that offers a robust end-to-end Ethernet service and relate the portfolio to what the business needs
• Go for the best contention ratio
• Evaluate the size and coverage of the network
• Look at the lead times
• Don’t neglect the service components, as they will affect how easy it’ll be to order changes or adjust reporting of your service later

I’d be interested in knowing what you think and how your strategies for delivering WAN services for your business are changing.