Network Diagramming Channel Feature

OPNET Provides New Ways to Look at Pricing Based on Network Capacity Utilization

By Amanda Ciccatelli
TMCnet Web Editor

Today, organizations are increasingly looking to either consolidate costs or increase profitability by ensuring they use or sell the capacity that they buy in the most optimal way. This rings true, especially when it comes to network diagramming for telco service providers and enterprises alike.

Enterprises primarily look to see if they are utilizing all resources efficiently for all applications, while telco service providers want to make sure that they are pricing the services appropriately for the varied markets they sell to.

Based on these challenges, OPNET, a provider of solutions for application and network performance management, offers capacity reporting designed to remove the noise from the reports so that users do not have to look for the circuits that show a high growth rate.

Using OPNET’s capacity reporting solution, this noise is brought to the user’s attention at a high level in a dashboard. They can use this information to find out where they need capacity or where they don’t need capacity. For instance, enterprises often use a report that shows which of the circuits are running high and when circuits will run out of capacity.

“So, they will know that within the next six months they need to budget for increasing the circuit capacity so they are not caught blindsided when they actually lose capacity,” Vinod Jeyachandran, vice president of engineering and product manager at OPNET, told TMCnet in an exclusive interview.

Another useful type of report shows the location of the bandwidth circuits that are expensive and may be not be being utilized at all. This gives incentive to decommission those circuits to put that money toward a different useful circuit or operation.

“Users can look at this report in different ways in order to see how best to optimize the use of capacity within their network, especially expensive capacity,” explained Jeyachandran.

On the other hand, service providers look at capacity reporting from a quality of service perspective, asking themselves, “Which quality of service am I getting a lot of utilization on?” and “Which region are the services running at a high utilization?”

“When they find out which regions are running at a high utilization, it shows that there is more demand there, which means they are able to charge more there than they are charging in other places,” he said.

Having this clear visibility of insight that comes on a regular basis enables service providers to change their pricing every quarter or so. Capacity reporting is something OPNET’s solutions provide and can highlight on a regular basis.