PTM market and applications

Internet Data Center market

Internet Data Centers (IDC) are a great strategy for Service Providers to combine their hosting and bandwidth capacity into a high value offering. However, guaranteeing performance can be a difficult task when applications of customers are spread across multiple servers. Additionally, the traditional solution of increasing the server capacity to keep customers happy does not scale neither technically, nor financially.
Subsequently, IDC operators need a tool able to monitor their customer’s application servers, but also to help them in the pro-active management of CPU capacity.

Leveraging the Cisco Service Control Engine (SCE) solution, PTM fits perfectly in the Internet Data Centers management scenario. With PTM, IDC operators can monitor the performance of application servers to ensure customers are getting the performance they expect. Moreover, PTM offers tools to help optimize the distribution of flows across servers to maximize return on investment.

Key factors for PTM deployment in IDC scenarios:

Financial Services and Enterprise market

The size and complexity of financial networks continue to increase due to the deployment of web based customer services and in-house multimedia applications such as VoIP, video conferencing and e-learning. The challenge is further worsen by the increase of new service oriented architectures and industry partnerships, which are boosting the complexity of “back office” IP networks by requiring ATM level quality of service guarantees. Subsequently, ensuring that mission critical financial transactions get properly executed has become the greatest challenge for financial network operators nowadays.

PTM has been successfully deployed with the Cisco SCE by some of the European largest financial institutes to manage their network.
PTM enables administrators to manage complex network environments via an easy-to-use GUI.

Key factors for PTM adoption in financial / enterprise environments:

Managed Services market

Managed services are a win-win strategy for Service Providers and Enterprise customers due the to increased efficiency that the shared network infrastructure provides. However, if not properly handled, Managed Services could result in a huge financial loss. The main issue in this field is the lack of network management tools able to monitor the traffic of different customers flowing through a shared infrastructure.
Under these conditions, it is hard to detect and solve application performance problems. Not surprisingly, many Enterprise customers have become wary of outsourcing mission critical applications to managed service providers.

With PTM and Cisco SCE and APA solutions, Service Providers can enhance their Managed Services offer by providing customers with a powerful platform to monitor, in real-time, the traffic usage and the performance of their own network applications.

Key factors of PTM for Managed Services: