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NewsGlobe: Currents
Competitive Internet Intelligence for Service Providers
Renesys Services Target Marketing, Sales and Strategy Execs
by Bob Wallace
Renesys Corp. today announced a series of Web-based offerings called Internet Intelligence Services designed to provide carriers a heightened level of operational and competitive intelligence as it relates to the global Internet.
Collectively, the three new offerings enable service providers to uniquely view Internet routes in real-time from multiple vantage points, each offering different levels of intelligence that can impact business decisions.
“Most companies provide and internal view of networks, like you’d get from a network operations center, but I haven’t seen anyone look or go beyond that,” said Glen Hunt, a senior analysts with the telecommunications infrastructure group at Current Analysis. “Two big positives for service providers here is that they can buy this as a service and they don’t have to instrument their own networks to extract this critical information.”
The services, collectively, are aimed at letting service providers “navigate from an economic and relationship point of view,’’ said Todd Underwood, Renesys’ Chief Operations Officer. “Network engineers see the data but don’t pass it on to business executives such as marketing and sales decision makers. Now, they can clearly watch their customers and their competition.”
The Renesys package comprises three services: Market Intelligence; Routing Intelligence; and XML Connection.
Market Intelligence
Market Intelligence provides a set of reference analysis tools to enable sales, marketing, business development and peering professionals, Renesys says, “to monitor the Internet’s competitive landscape.”
The company explains that the core of Market Intelligence is its Internet Index, a master database of information compiled daily from the Internet’s global routing tables - the real-time map of 180,000 networks and 30,000 organizations worldwide that make up the Internet.
Renesys says its Internet Index provides the data used for indices and reports that are provided by Market Intelligence. This information includes competitive data on the global, national and regional rankings of all service providers based on the actual measured number and quality of customer networks they connect to the Internet.
The company also claims Market Intelligence provides annotated lists of service providers’ current customers, including their geographic distribution and an analysis of the services they currently receive from competing providers. This is in addition to a daily change list for the service providers who have been chosen as the primary provider, or moved to secondary status plus longer-term trends of market performance from competing providers.
“What service provider wouldn’t want this information for efforts to prevent losing customers from poor service performance as well for the opportunity to win customers who are having performance problems, or worse, away from rivals?” asked Hunt. While most operators have folks and systems in their competitive intelligence groups, being able to strongly play offense and defense requires very granular data, put in actionable contexts, he added.
Renesys also claims Market Intelligence offers side-by-side comparisons of the vital stats of multiple service providers, including relative analyses of their Internet Index rankings, customer based measurements and regional strengths and weaknesses.
Routing Intelligence
This service provides detailed and immediate information that service providers need to correct slowdowns or interruptions to critical Internet links. It also provides what Renesys calls “detailed forensics and analytic capabilities” that include the ability to correlate routing information across different time periods and from multiple sources, and the ability to display data in tabular and graph formats.
Service providers can purchase Routing Intelligence with an option called Alarms, which provides real-time alerts when networks become unreachable, IP addresses are hijacked, global routes become unstable, or policies are violated. Renesys claims this functionality is unique as it does it for events that occur outside the service provider’s infrastructure.
As a result, Renesys contends, its customers can use the data to provide higher throughput and greater reliability than their competitors – and potentially lower their support costs – by finding and fixing problems before they affect subscribers.
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