- Is the Cisco MARS mission going to abort?
- First iPhone worm spreads Rick Astley wallpaper
- 10 stunning 3D buildings made with Google SketchUp
- Open source software ready for big business
- Four reasons to buy (and one reason to avoid) the Droid
IT executive Tom Giannetti faced a difficult but common problem. He needed to upgrade from modem connections to broadband services at 350 retail locations across the country.
Trying to find the right coverage from multiple service providers proved “too labor intensive and cost prohibitive,” says Giannetti, who is vice president of IT for the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain. Instead, he hired virtual network operator (VNO) MegaPath to piece together broadband services from a variety of providers.
While some network executives might say he’s loco for giving up control over his WAN links, Giannetti believes he’s crazy like a fox. “Hiring a VNO enabled El Pollo Loco to deploy broadband services in hundreds of restaurants without increasing internal IT staff,” he says.
And the migration was a mission-critical move that afforded El Pollo Loco measurable gains. For instance, patrons now wait less than two seconds — rather than 10 to 12 seconds — for credit card transaction approval.
Midsize businesses such as El Pollo Loco are the bread-and-butter of VNOs, which are defined as WAN services vendors who do not own their own facilities.
“VNOs can offer higher levels of customer service and customization than larger network-owning players. Each customer is that much more important to a VNO, especially the midsize customer, which typically isn’t the focus of the global telecom players,” says Jan Dawson, vice president of enterprise practice for market-research firm Ovum.
The original appeal of VNOs was that they offered to take over the dizzying prospect of negotiating contracts with foreign carriers and the painful process of dealing with stacks of invoices and intricate billing procedures from multiple vendors.
That’s still true, but these days VNOs are adding enterprise services to lure larger customers. Many are serving up security and network-management offerings, such as IP, MPLS and SSL VPN access options. They also are offering intrusion prevention and related endpoint security services to help companies manage mobile workers.
“The availability of enhanced services certainly contributed to our move in the direction of a VNO contract,” Giannetti says.
Partner Content
Blue Stripe Software
www.bluestripe.com/
Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting
Diagnosing why an application is slow is hard, at times taking days or weeks to isolate and resolve. This paper explains the challenges involved using current management tools, provides a 'wish list' for application management and analysis, and explains the need for an application system-wide approach that monitors entire applications, not components.
Download Whitepaper
Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments
This paper highlights the impact of virtualization on application performance. "Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments" states: "Best-in-Class organizations are predominately taking actions around improving visibility across both physical and virtual systems, assessing the business impact of application performance and understanding interdependencies of applications in virtualized environments."
Download Whitepaper
Application Service Requests: The Missing Link for Pragmatic ITSM
Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell and BlueStripe co-founder Vic Nyman discuss a breakthrough approach to application problem management. Learn the new approach for ITSM problem management, which provides: Rapid isolation of application slow-downs to specific components for quick problem resolution, 24/7 monitoring for proactive notification of potential issues before end users are impacted and much more.
Register for Webcast
Comments (1)
VNO veritasBy Anonymous on April 30, 2007, 11:32 amHe's absolutely right!!! Re: VNO veritas.
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments