Transforming B2B network performance visibility with a superior self-serve experience

Network connectivity is the backbone of today’s digital businesses and reliable real-time network performance is increasingly important for cloud applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) that rely on communications service provider (CSP) networks.

Whereas a certain measure of network latency or traffic congestion was tolerated even a few years ago, business-critical enterprise applications and services now often require sub-second network reliability and performance.

Because network reliability is crucial, CSP end-customer portals on a per-customer basis are becoming a “must-have.” CSPs now need these customer portals for competitiveness, and service differentiation, and to show services are meeting the quality of experience that enterprises demand.

B2B customer portals also help CSPs save money because they enable self-service in terms of proactive network and service monitoring and visibility on potential issues. The cost of trouble tickets and call center interactions go down when enterprise customers can transparently see network performance and get advance notice of potential service issues.

What to consider for end-user B2B portals

CSPs have struggled in the past with offering B2B customer portals because it is expensive to develop them in-house. It isn’t easy to deliver a single-pane-of-glass view of network and service performance across multiple domains and silos of reporting tools – and do it in a personalized, secure way for each unique enterprise customer.

The requirements list for a CSP customer portal rollout can be daunting. The portal solution must:

• Be cloud-native and multi-tenant
• Come with role-based access control (RBAC) for user and data segregation and security
• Have single-sign-on (SSO) for smooth integration with existing tools and portals
• Enable administrators to create custom dashboards for end users on the fly
• Offer multi-vendor ingestion and reporting of almost any data series
• Include machine learning to allow predictive analysis and alerting on anomalies
• Offer alerts to end users about potential service degradations

This is not an easy requirements list for CSPs to meet.

How Skylight Performance Analytics can help you differentiate and win

There is an operationally efficient way forward for CSPs that would like to give enterprise customers a self-service dashboard for monitoring their network service performance. Skylight Performance Analytics enables CSPs to securely, quickly, and easily offer each enterprise end user a custom portal for monitoring the performance of their network connectivity.

This single pane of glass view enables CSPs to bring together performance data from across its network infrastructure for an end-to-end view of network service and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Skylight makes it possible to break out performance data on the individual network level as well, so CSPs can use the platform not only to collect all network performance data but also to offer it to enterprise customers on a per-customer network basis. In other words, Skylight can serve as a multi-tenant customer portal solution for a CSP’s end users.

For multi-vendor SD-WAN reporting visualization and analytics, third-party metrics also can be ingested to show related KPIs from different SD-WAN vendors, the underlying network, and other data important to each end user. It is this combined dataset and the powerful analytical features supported by the platform that deliver unrivaled insights for each enterprise customer.

Accedian’s customer portals in practice

Zain Kuwait, a mobile operator that serves more than 50 million consumers and business customers across seven Middle East and Africa countries, used Accedian Skylight and Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation platform to give customers their own custom dashboards to visualize network and MPLS layer 3 service performance and alerts. The combination of Skylight’s circuit stitching and performance monitoring capabilities paired with Cisco’s best-in-class automation and SDN control capabilities create a feature-rich, intent-based assurance platform for each enterprise customer.

By giving enterprise customers their own performance dashboards, Zain Kuwait has reduced support costs while differentiating from its competitors and delivering a higher level of service experience.

Another advantage is that the same platform is used by Zain Kuwait’s in-house teams for service provider network visibility and proactive performance monitoring of network and service quality.

Learn more about how Skylight customer portal can help you transform network performance visibility and deliver a superior self-serve customer experience.