Hrvatski Telekom improves fault monitoring and customer experience with IBM Netcool

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In a world that increasingly revolves around data, customer experience, trust and digital ecosystems, telecommunication service providers need to reinvent themselves to stay relevant in a highly competitive market with a business network that is becoming even more complex. This year, over 60% of mobile users are expected to access the Internet from their mobile phone and mobile e-commerce will drive $2.32 trillion sales by 2021. Many of those opportunities will arise from the rollout of 5G technologies, which are expected to create significant business opportunities for telecom providers.

Hrvatski Telekom is the leading provider of telecommunications services in Croatia which serves 2.262 million mobile subscribers, almost 856,000 million fixed lines, 488,000 television services and 745,000 broadband connections with customer base growing each day. This means we need to be able to deliver high quality digital customer experiences each single day to our clients all over Croatia without any issues.

We must take care to avoid performance degradations such as dropped calls, unintelligible conversations, line static and other problems that stem from the volatility of the IP environment. VoIP performance and service problems such as jitter, latency and packet loss—not to mention problems such as configuration errors, system integration and network-related regulatory compliance issues that affect any business network—mean that a provider can lose twice.

Also, we have to surveil all our services which keep growing and changing according to trends. Without proper surveillance, business can stop in its tracks. And customers can become dissatisfied, even to the point of resigning the service. In order to support our customers properly, we needed a secure IT environment and centralized view of our network operations and services to have a full control of our business by monitoring service availability and performance.

For us, the main problem was an increasing number of alarms and events in HT’s managed services provider infrastructure required rapid identification and resolution before they impact customer infrastructure. Until now HT had two main Fault Management Systems and many standalone Element Managers and Equipment which were monitored only through Element Mangers.

Additional problem was that both Fault Management Systems were legacy software and out of maintenance cycle.We turned to IBM as our long-term partner and together with experts from IBM Services we successfully implemented IBM Netcool Operations Insight. As a result of cooperation with IBM and several HT departments, new Fault Management solution was created.

It satisfies HT business needs: it is technologically advanced, capable to process large quantities of data, it is very adaptive, with possibilities for expansion and upgrade, capable to integrate new systems using new protocols, to correlate alarms, detect problems early, has redundant architecture, high availability, it is resistant to alarm floods and at last but not least important, whole system is documented.

The new solution also has predictive insight modules to automatically identify volume reducing signals, find repeating issues, after deploying IBM Netcool software the company identifies and ranks events by their seasonal nature. There is also possibility to install additional automation as well as artificial intelligence.

We can say that together with IBM we have reduced the number of trouble tickets and focus more time and resources on what really matters to our customers instead of to be overwhelmed with alarms and sustainability of many legacy modules.