In today’s IP-based environment, where communications and business and multimedia and other applications all share the same bandwidth, maintaining the health of the network is more crucial than ever. Because in today’s converged environments, the network is a resource to be consumed by any kind of application or communication method, its reliability has become a critical issue more than ever. But with the growing number of applications and vendors and service providers and end users, providing good customer support is also more complex than ever. Which is why the latest trend is support automation.

 

NextNine and Apparent have a solution — the support automation solutions provider (NextNine) and the network diagnostics and analytics systems developer (Apparent) have partnered to bring a cutting-edge technical support solution to its combined customer base. With the integration of the two solutions — they will still be sold as separate products, according to NextNine vice president of marketing and strategy Gil Levonai — customers will be able to examine the entire network to ensure its reliability and the performance of its applications.

 

NextNine specializes in support automation at the system level — not at the application or device level — and provides the tools that allow support of entire systems for companies like Motorola (News - Alert), GE Healthcare, and OpenWave, who all use NextNine to automate support to their customers. NextNine’s intuitive Virtual Support Engineer checks the equipment on site, correlates this information with network data and rapidly resolves the identified problem all without the need for field visits or customer assistance.

 

Apparent, on the other hand, has developed technology that enables troubleshooting at the network level. In other words, users are able to understand what’s going on in your network, in terms of bandwidth allocation, performance, SLA compliance, and so on.  Designed specifically for remotely assessing and troubleshooting converged networks, AppCritical provides end-to-end visibility into any live network, and identifies and outlines all conditions and faults that will impact network quality.

 

This is important because application developers and vendors spend considerable time ensuring the stability of their products, but, in the end, the end user experience is reliant on the network’s ability to support it.

 

“The partnership provides a joint solution for automated tools for system support, and also the underlying network, because many times, the problem is actually in the network,” said Levonai. “The combination of products is going to be offered such that the Apparent product is going to actually report into the NextNine infrastructure and enable us to complement system diagnostics with some robust network diagnostics.”

 

“This enables us to deliver a remote support solution that automatically identifies, analyzes and resolves problems at both the application and network levels” added Adi Dulberg, NextNine CEO.

 

Ultimately, customers will save both time and money, not to mention aggravation, in being able to identify trouble spots and resolve issues, regardless of whether they appear at the application level, the system level, or the network level. The efficiencies created by this combination of NextNine and Apparent will benefit the entire customer support system.

 

“If you think about the amount of technology being deployed, manual support simply cannot scale to that level, so it has to be automated. So we see a lot of growth and a lot of interest in support automation,” said Levonai.