New Virtela Technology Uses 'Predictive Analytics' To Head Off Network Outages: Page 2 of 2

The RIMS market is forecast to grow by 90 percent in North America by 2014, according to Eric Goodness, a Gartner research VP who attributes the growth to users becoming more comfortable with the remote delivery model and because vendors are making more investments in service automation in order to provide better service at lower prices. The types of networks that Virtela monitors include multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, also known as packet-switched networks, digital subscriber lines (DSL), Ethernet and 3G and 4G wireless networks.

Virtela calls its offering IT management services rather than remote IT management services because sometimes its monitoring equipment is located on the customer's network, says Weiner. Services include assisting in audit and compliance efforts, discovery of devices on a network, inventory management and modeling of proposed configuration changes before they are made, in order to see what adverse impacts the changes might have on the network.

And, as the predictive analytics function continues to operate, it gains more knowledge of potential network impact, essentially getting smarter as it goes along, says Hansard. "As a result, we're able to see some very interesting things and increase our predictive model so that we can then anticipate things before they actually go bad," he says.

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