IP service provider Masergy Communications is rolling out a tool aimed at reducing the amount of time it takes users to establish management policies across its network.

For example, companies using the Policy Manager will be able to establish application priority level and bandwidth allocation policies for all their routers simultaneously, rather than individually.

The tool will work with all of Masergy's WAN offerings, including inControl IP, inControl Voice and inControl Virtual Private LAN Service.

This sort of application could be attractive to customers that make lots of configuration changes, says Zeus Kerravala, a vice president at The Yankee Group. He says the research firm found in a recent survey that "one-third of all downtime is related to configuration errors."

Barry Nalls, Masergy's president and CEO, says the software will save customers hours and clean up mistakes. Until now, users have had to type in a set of commands, copy and paste them to each router and hope they didn't make errors, he says.

Policy Manager is accessible through Masergy's Service Control Center portal. The new program presents a list of 85 applications that many companies use across their networks. Customers also have the option of entering in as many custom applications as they need.

Next to each application there are a series of columns where users can select a priority level - normal, priority, critical, voice or video, in that order. To the right of the priority list, users also can enter in how much bandwidth they want to devote to that application.

Before going live with changes, users can test the policies. Users can update from five to 500 routers at once.

By midyear, Masergy also plans to let users schedule policy changes based on their business needs. For example, if a company transfers financial documents every night, it could increase the bandwidth allocation every evening and then automatically throttle it back in the morning.

Policy Manager is priced based on network size.