Do you need network lifecycle management services? If you’re interested in increasing your network efficiency and business productivity and profitability, well, you should at least look into it.

As one industry player puts it, “Lifecycle management services are comprised to help identify, mitigate and eliminate automation obsolescence risk.”

A lifecycle management services product offering from managed network services provider Spacenet hits a lot of the sweet spots when it comes to finding ROI via lifecycle management. Company officials say their approach is “network neutral,” so it doesn’t matter what kind of network you’re running, you’ll get some benefits.

The company breaks down their offerings in four basic areas:

Proactive Network Management: This operates on the principle that if you’re having problems or glitches anywhere on your network, you’re having them on your whole network. A problem in one place is a problem everywhere. Spacenet offers monitoring, maintenance, troubleshooting and a help desk to watch the multiple contact points across multiple providers, something that would probably be pretty difficult for you to handle yourself in-house unless you’ve got a costly IT department.

And if there is a problem that results in an outage, Spacenet will work with the providers involved to resolve the issue and get your network back up and running, using a trouble ticket system to keep you informed of progress.

Spacenet Customer Portal: This is simply a place you can go to check on the network status and information for yourself, giving you a summary of the historical as well as current trends. It’s a one-stop place for supervising such services as “ordering, inventory management, network monitoring, network and remote CPE management, and network status and statistics reporting,” Spacenet officials say.

Network and Performance Optimization: This is the heart of the matter. If your company has a lot of money invested in an existing legacy network, that could be a pretty serious impediment to a wholly objective evaluation of just how efficient that system is and how well it’s meeting your needs, as opposed to other, newer -- and in all likelihood less expensive -- options. If you knew exactly where to upgrade to new but not experimental technologies across your network, you could see some real ROI.

Spacenet helps you through that process. Spacenet recommends auditing your network at least once every two years, the pace of progress is such that if nothing in your system is less than two years old, you’re probably losing efficiency and profitability somewhere along the line. Company officials point to a recently completed analysis and upgrade for a customer,” where  “Spacenet was able to reduce the customer’s ongoing network costs by 10 percent, while more than doubling their bandwidth.”

And what if that customer was your direct competitor?

Billing Services: While it’s most efficient to have the best product in each part of your network, that usually means many different providers, which means a whole lot of bills coming in. It can be quite confusing -- if you’re doing it right it should be -- but Spacenet offers to review all invoices for accuracy and match it against services actually received.

In short, Spacenet’s offering take the worry out of your network, so you can worry about what it is you actually do.

Want to learn more about Managed Service Providers? Then be sure to attend MSPWorld, collocated with TMC’s ITEXPO East 2012taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. Since its inception, MSPWorld has been the only event with a single, vendor-agnostic focus of supporting Managed Service providers and their respective ecosystems. MSPWorld in Miami will delve into the most pressing channel and end-user issues that MSPs and their customers confront every day. For more information on registering for MSPWorld click here.

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