Interview: Douglas Loewe on Network Management

Ahead of the Network Management Show 2014, we've been interviewing our speakers to get their views on the hot topics.

 

This week we spoke to Douglas Loewe, Managing Director, Interxion, who will be speaking on Day 1 of the conference on the topic of 'Connectivity and Managing Data Centres: Making Smart Cities a Reality'. Read his thoughts below.  

Why is network management important in the telecom industry today? 

As a carrier neutral data centre, we don’t operate our own network, but we do work with over 500 carriers, so we have a pretty good understanding of what works for them and their customers.

 
One of things our customers say they look for when picking a carrier is the ability to ensure their high value applications have excellent response times for their end users. To deliver good response times you need to have good network management, so in my view good network management is absolutely crucial for the telecom industry.    

 

Where do you see most innovation happening in the network today? 

I think the key innovation has to be around flexibility through things like better speed of provisioning and dynamic bandwidth. Also I think application aware networking is really interesting and something that is changing the networking landscape.    

 

Is how you manage your network an opportunity for differentiation for telecom operators? 

Definitely.  When enterprises come to our data centre they tend to already know which carriers they want to use and the carriers that we hear the most are usually the ones that are well managed, offer flexibility and most importantly can deliver good response times.

 

How do you guarantee the customer experience? 

From what I see when working with carriers, is those that offer extra layers of resilience with good capacity to handle rapid traffic growth are usually the ones that continuously deliver on customer experience.  

 

Can operators look at trends such as SDN, Big Data, and network sharing in isolation or must they consider the wider Network Management perspective?

 

I don’t think any of these can be looked at in isolation. What we are seeing is that carrier-neutral data centres are the place where operators are introducing their SDN and Big Data products first and enterprises are selecting the carriers that can support all of these services and have a integrated approach on them.   

 

If you are interested in attending The Network Management Show you can find out more here.

Selection Box - Total Telecom+

In the May issue (download as a PDF) you'll find invaluable information and insight including:


Pick N Mix: Telcos have an opportunity to act as cloud services aggregators

Tower Top Tales: We talk to Ooredoo's Paul Salmon about the telco's plans to modernise its networks.

Gold Rush: The sale of mobile licences in Myanmar has attracted some of the world’s biggest telcos.

Total Telecom+ is designed for digital and is available on iOS or Android (find out more about the Apps) or can be downloaded as a PDF

Top 10 #Telecom Downloads of 2011

We all love rankings, don't we, so it seemed a good idea to end 2011 with another, this time the Top Telecom Downloads of 2011.

Downloads with Total Telecom mean white papers and other special reports and documents that we've hosted for you to download from our website, providing a wealth of valuable information, so there are bound to be some here that you would benefit from. The list below are the Top 10 most popular downloads of 2011:

1. Global 100 Operators 2011 (annual report from Total Telecom)
2. Global 100 Operators 2010 (annual report from Total Telecom)
3. Beyond MPLS: Enabling Cloud-Ready Networks (White Paper from Ipanema Technologies)
4. Carrier Ethernet Basics (White Paper from EXFO)
5. Telecoms Reinvention: Death Of The Traditional Telco (White Paper from ATG)
6. Smart Mobile Networks, Not Dumb Pipes (Customer Magazine from Tellabs)
7. Five myths of cloud computing (White Paper from HP)
8. Seizing The Opportunity In Mobile Broadband (White Paper from Acision)
9. Next-Gen PON: Sardana merges metro & access networks (Customer Magazine from Tellabs)
10. Best Practice to Stay Ahead of Communication Industry Standards (White Paper from Progress Software)

This list has been compiled based on the data captured by our Nielsen NetRatings online measurement tool, a fantastic analytical tool, that not only tells us who read what, but is also audited by the BPA, meaning you don't have to take our word for it (we're the only website in the telco sector to do this).

So does the list throw up any surprises? Probably not. Any cheating? No, not unless you count the omission of our media pack from the list - wow a lot of people like reading what we're planning!

Why not check out other White Papers yourself by visiting http://www.totaltele.com/whitepapers or speak to us about hosting your own.