Friday, April 09, 2010
Those Stranded Assets Sure Look Nice
This would be better if I was in a classroom but bear with me. Let’s see a show of hands if you’ve ever over-provisioned when new technology’s been introduced into your network. Now, don’t be embarrassed because your colleague just noticed that you raised your hand for seemingly no reason. This scenario is inevitable really.
Market projections are bound to be off to some degree. Surpluses and shortages throughout the network are a fact of life. Shortages are easy to spot. There’s usually a service delivery issue on the other end. But surpluses, those are a little trickier.
Surplus capacity typically gets mounted in a rack, wired to a distribution frame, and waits to be activated. It’s the job of Operations personnel to get it installed and running. But, without a network interrogation system in place, or a remarkably accurate provisioning system, it’s rare that anyone will ever go back to see whether the equipment has been deployed optimally, thereby exposing excess capacity.
Equipment that is deployed but never carries revenue-generating traffic is what we refer to as a ‘stranded asset.’ Even equipment that is carrying a partial load can be classified as a stranded asset. For example, if there are 4 DS1 cards in an Ethernet Switch, and each is only using 6 DS1 ports, they could be combined into a single card, making the other 3 DS1 cards available for reuse elsewhere in the network.
In its own way, over-provisioning can appear to be a perfectly rational exercise. After all, what network deployment team wants to be caught unprepared? But as I mentioned earlier, when customer take-rates don’t meet projections, those assets can become forgotten pretty quickly.
Not only are stranded assets incapable of generating revenue, they are often still covered by a maintenance contract, which means a carrier is paying a vendor to ensure SLAs are met – even though there may be no traffic on the device. Now, that’s a double whammy!
The obvious culprit here is a lack of visibility. You can’t put to better use what you can’t see. That’s why visibility is the core tenant of reuse optimization.
A reuse strategy built around establishing comprehensive visibility into a carrier’s entire ecosystem creates opportunities to get more use – and therefore more revenue – out of each network asset. Surpluses are inevitable but in a difficult economic environment, you’ve got to get the maximum return on the capital you’re putting forth to ensure service delivery levels.
