NOOS & AQOS case study
A Leading Broadband Supplier in France
NOOS is a French subsidiary of Liberty Global, an international communications conglomerate. More specifically, NOOS belongs to the Liberty Global's UPC Broadband Division, the European leader of multiple networks services with more than 11 million subscribers in 13 countries of Europe.
The NOOS network serves approximately 4.6 million homes and the company has 1.5 million basic cable subscribers, 295,000 Internet subscribers and 135,000 telephony subscribers. Major operations are located in Paris and its suburbs including the Marne la Vallee area east of Paris, Strasbourg, Orleans, Le Mans, the suburbs of Lyon, the southeast region, and other operations spread throughout France.
IP Telephony is the Future Network
A fast-growing part of the NOOS network delivers voice over IP (VoIP) services to subscribers. It is critical to the company that they be able to monitor the voice-traffic flows across the network and respond quickly to service issues.
“We did not have a tool that could report on the voice links from either a real-time or flow-based perspective,” says Raphael Bourgeois, manager of the Tools & Supervisions Service in the Information Technology Department at NOOS. “It was too hard to pinpoint problems when they occurred, and so we were spending too much time problem-solving compared to the strategic tasks demanded by business managers.”
ACE Live Goes With the Flows
Working with AQOS, a major French IT consultancy and integrator, NOOS installed an ACE Live appliance to monitor their VoIP traffic flows.
“We were impressed both by the ease of installation and the speed with which the appliance delivered valuable information,” says Mr. Bourgeois. “The return on investment took only a couple of months, and we are looking forward to expanding our implementation to cover more of the network.”
He also notes that the appliance is proving easy to integrate with their RAMI portal, a management portal that integrates data from many sources and which serves several hundred technical users. “It has proved itself to be a useful source of information beyond what we originally expected.”
Gauging Business Impact
Mr. Bourgeois notes that the ACE Live Business Group capability is particularly important to NOOS technicians. “The Business Groups make it easy to assign business significance to groups of IP addresses—to identify them with particular groups of users. This is very useful for revealing the priority of a problem: who is affected, how many users.”
In addition, he notes that this capability, combined with the clarity of the reports delivered by ACE Live make it much easier for his technical team to communicate with non-technical users. “Now we can show them what's really going on in terms that make sense to them: how it impacts the business.”
And the appliance itself has had a notable business impact. “We are able to solve problems more quickly than before, and, using the historical capabilities of ACE Live, we can preserve a record of what happened and how we addressed it, which improves our response the next time around.”
A Recommendation
“I would say that anyone with similar needs should consider the ACE Live solution,” says Mr. Bourgeois. “They will, I think, find that it very quickly delivers value in a way that is convincing to both technical and non-technical people.”
"[ACE Live] stands out from all other Management tools we are familiar with in both its ease of use, and the speed with which it delivered valuable information upon installation.”
Raphael Bourgeois,
Manager, Tools & Supervisions Service
NOOS Information Technology Department