Infovista, leader in modern network performance, announced the launch of its service assurance solution at MEF19. VistaInsight is dedicated to increasing business agility and interoperability in hybrid networks, while leading organizations through digital transformation. In an exclusive interview, Andy Asava, EVP Global Networks spoke with Telecom Review about the importance of knowing your business model, creating a solution that adds value to the customer and creating monetization.
SD-WAN is a huge theme at MEF19. Can you tell us about your VistaInsight Service Assurance solution that you have just launched?
We are here at MEF to showcase our service assurance solution. VistaInsight SD-WAN service assurance builds on Infovista’s expertise in providing deep performance insights to help service providers to scale and effectively monetize virtualized network services. It also leverages Infovista’s expertise and experience as a leading SD-WAN vendor. SD-WAN is essentially a way of enabling the enterprise customer to have a more reliable, application-aware technology between its various customer sites. As a service assurance vendor, we are very keen on adopting new technologies that are emerging and SD-WAN is the latest one. We have built that capability into our system to support multi-vendor SD-WAN solutions that are out there.
Infovista won two technology solutions awards at MEF19, including the Service Assurance award and the Service Analytics award. Are you proud to be recognized as a leader in the industry?
I think that it is pivotal. It’s not just about Infovista getting on a stage and winning awards, it is the recognition that we are solving a profound industry problem. Frankly, the whole industry has embraced SD-WAN and is trying to rapidly deploy it, but they are deploying it blindly. They need to understand the service objectives that particular SD-WAN services should meet in order to suit the consumer. I think it is an industry problem. I am really glad that Infovista, with its years of experience in service assurance, has got the right digital assets. More importantly, we have got the right people to be able to solve this issue. There is a lot more work ahead. This is not a one-and-done solution. This is something we will continue to build on. We love MEF because it offers us collaborations that we need across multi-domain and multi-vendors. It is something we all need to contribute to in order to keep this momentum of MEF moving forward. It’s something we need to do for the future of our industry. That is why I think it is well worth it. It is well worth our time and contribution, even if we did not win our awards.
We are hearing a lot about the ‘digital transformation’ and Industry 4.0, but what are some of the problems that you can see in the industry right now?
For me, monetization is key. There is no point addressing the digital transformation or technology evolution without understanding what a business model is. I see a lot of companies throwing out buzz words like ‘machine learning’, ‘digital transformation’ and ‘blockchain’. It reminds me of that old saying, “build it and they will come”. You don’t want to build technology for the sake of it. We also don’t want digital transformation just for the sake of it. We need to understand the outcome and how you monetize on it. In order to monetize on it, you have got to create value for your customers. It should be evident why this technology is necessary for their business objectives. We think that data is the underpinning of the entire solution, especially as we start looking at fragmentation that is happening in the edge and at the multitude of connections and the multi-domain environments that are coming in. It is there that you have a multi-cloud environment , 5G underlay access and applications that are requiring not just infotainment, but consistency and reliability every single time. We view that as pivotal. We need data and we need service assurance of that data. It is critical. That will lead to added-value to the customer and monetization. That is how digital transformation needs to be looked at. Let’s not do it because it’s the next hype-based technology. Let’s do it because we are creating value.
