Last week, CEO Lyndon Cantor announced our deepening commitment to Application Quality of Experience, which we amplified in a webinar “Introducing App QoE.” We have seen through the work we do with our customers and the research in our annual Global Internet Phenomena Report that applications and services have become the lifeblood of the applications and digital services – integral to life, work and leisure today.
No matter the challenges of the past few years, you’ve reliably delivered high-quality experiences, empowering your customers to continue on, even during the pandemic and during uncertain economic times. You’ve continued to meet unwavering assumptions that performance and quality will always be there – no matter the tonnage, no matter the latency demands, no matter the complexity of the apps and services.
But now you’re at an inflection point: either continue to build out capacity in perpetuity in order to satisfy all customers “at any cost” (even to the detriment of your own bottomline), or, start building business models that prioritize your own sustainability through profits you can reinvest into your networks.
We believe the path to new revenue streams and profitable business models hinge on your ability to deliver optimal app usage and performance, which we call Application Quality of Experience (App QoE). To help you consistently hit QoE targets, as well as better define, measure, and monetize the value you deliver to your customers and partners, we are now Sandvine – The App QoE Company. We are laser focused on helping you understand subscriber usage and application bandwidth behaviors, so you can dynamically and intelligently apply the right level of management, at the right time. This will ensure the greatest number of customers get the level of performance and app QoE they expect – and all without massive CAPEX buildouts or continued OPEX pressure!
By satisfying customers of different usage types across a spectrum of needs and expectations, you can more surgically deliver and monetize what is delivered in terms of bandwidth, speed and efficiency.
This is a journey, and App QoE is an end state – a manifestation of all you do around network and capacity planning, congestion management, troubleshooting, customer care, charging, billing, and plan creation. When you quantify what’s happening over your networks, and better manage and deliver traffic accordingly, you derive the most business value.
As an app QoE company, we’ll be doing what we do best: providing accurate data to fuel better decision-making, which in turn fuels better business outcomes.
Our unparalleled accuracy will be tailored to you, whether you’re the CTO responsible for P&L and determining network usage and impact on churn and capacity; or the head of Planning and Engineering, conducting what-if analyses to decide how much CAPEX will or will not meet QoE demands; Operations, tasked with troubleshooting problems and engaging with customer care; or Big Data, providing the right data to the right stakeholders for the best decision making across the entire organization.
This outcome-driven accuracy will come through three pillars of App QoE:
1) Reliable Single Source of Data – a vendor- and access-agnostic “best source of data” that, in real time, delivers insights relevant to QoE before data overloads your data center. This robust data source provides KPIs and metadata from different vendors’ NFs and OAMs. It is enriched by not only IT and big data experts, but also your business end-users, who can be active participants in making your organization data-driven and intelligent.
2) Traffic Classification and QoE Scoring – a “single pane of glass” through which we classify more than 95 percent of network traffic across thousands of apps, a vast improvement on the average 70% accuracy derived from traditional switches, probes and gateways. Using machine-learning techniques, heuristics, behavioral analysis, and communications protocols, we accurately classify best- and worst-performing applications, as well as the users and devices impacted for actionable insight.
With a library of more than 2,500 application signatures in combination with QoE scoring, we reveal network and performance problems through unique, easy-to-use visualization dashboards that bring a robust database to life. The insights derived provide experiential scoring of performance KPIs, such as throughput, latency, and packet loss at second and sub-second intervals. This data is enriched with information about volume, network, topology, and other variables that correlate how users perceive QoE.
3) Automation –Through 25 Application and Network Intelligence use cases that span analytics, network optimization, and closed-loop automation, streamline critical CAPEX processes and realize efficiencies that lower OPEX. By driving automation into hybrid, multicloud and cloud-native deployments, we move you closer to closed-loop automation and CI/CD processes. That is where the rubber hits the road: automatic action based on real-time feedback. This automatic "remediation" and "reconciliation" addresses the dynamic nature of traffic demands and next-gen applications.
Our more focused App QoE approach will enable you to design networks for user experience, not capacity. With it, you can foster more equitable use of your network resources and improve what you do with planning, operations, benchmarking, heavy usage management, and monetization. The actionable insights we provide will distinguish between high-tonnage apps like streaming video and the low latency /high availability apps (like virtual assistants, security cameras, IoT sensors), as well as decipher upstream and downstream traffic, and the complexity of content within those apps (combinations of video calls, gaming, file transfers, financial transactions, etc.).
These insights will empower you to create plans and pricing continuously tailored to customers’ needs and usage patterns, as well as the impact they have on your network. That’s how you can incentivize your most sophisticated power users and heavy users, moving them toward more performance-centric, tiered plans that include highly valued zero-rated applications and quota top-ups.
In the coming weeks and months, we will show how our solutions analyze, optimize, and monetize the value that you deliver over your networks – not only to your consumer and enterprise customers, but to other service providers and their customers.
To learn more, check out my new video interview with Light Reading and our recent “Introducing App QoE” webinar.
If you want to learn more, schedule a demo today.
Related resources:
Performance Monitoring and Analysis,
Subscriber Service Analysis
Real-Time Subscriber Insights
Gaming QoE Analysis
Heavy User Management
Use Case eBook
Video QoE Analysis
Video Streaming Management
Intent-based Congestion Management