Virtela Launches Industry's First IT Infrastructure Management Service Based on Predictive Analytics

DENVER, March 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Key Enterprise Benefits:

• Better uptime: Achieve 5x reduction in downtime for global IT infrastructure
• Better savings: Reduce operational costs, typically by 30 percent
• Better service guarantees: Shift from Mean-Time-to-Repair to Actual-Time-to-Repair

Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company, today announced the availability of  the industry's first IT infrastructure management service that integrates predictive  analytics technology to accelerate the identification and resolution of enterprise IT infrastructure issues before they impact quality of service.  

Leveraging newly-developed technology, called VirtelaPredict™, Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service is able to diagnose more than 95% of potential enterprise network and security issues before they can impact network health. By speeding resolution of issues – or avoiding them altogether – the new service enables enterprises to achieve a 5x reduction in downtime while cutting support and operating costs by an average of 30 percent.

Virtela serves as a single point of contact worldwide for proactive management of a wide array of multivendor IT infrastructure – including WAN, LAN, IP telephony, application acceleration and security devices – regardless of whether it resides within headquarters, branch offices, private or public clouds. Virtela's world-class Network and Security Operations Centers perform 24x7 predictive modeling, monitoring and management with hands-on expertise across best-in-class technologies, delivering a superior end user experience on a global basis.

"Virtela is truly an extension of my IT staff, providing advanced skills and technologies to proactively manage our global multivendor IT infrastructure," said Bharat Poria, senior director of information technology for Natus Medical Incorporated, a leading provider of healthcare products using Virtela's management service. "Virtela often fixes issues before our IT staff or end users are even aware of them, giving them consistently better performance and enabling us to shift our IT focus from operational infrastructure reaction to proactive and advance planning execution."

As CIOs increasingly look for infrastructure management services partners, Virtela is integrating the industry's first set of predictive analytics technologies specifically developed for managing networks and IT service infrastructure. These services can also be leveraged by Virtela's current and new partners worldwide, and fully integrate with partners' back-end systems and can private-labeled, to offer a seamless service to end customers.

These new tools and technologies, such as VirtelaPredict, continuously analyze and process a large number of log and event data generated by network, security and other devices, using predictive analytics algorithms and rules. As a result, Virtela's service can more quickly identify root causes, "hidden" conditions, or early warning signs that could potentially lead to outages.

According to a major new survey of more than 400 IT leaders, multinational companies are demanding their service providers deliver more timely notification and resolution of IT infrastructure issues. Virtela is directly addressing these concerns in its new service, which specifically answers the top three service management needs cited by IT executives: faster issue notification, response time, and repair time.

By applying these innovations, Virtela is able to offer the world's first Time to Repair (TTR) Service Level Agreement (SLA) for infrastructure management services. Conventional Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) SLAs are based on an average of many incidents across devices; companies can experience an extended outage of one critical site or device that seriously impacts operations yet does not constitute an SLA violation. Virtela's TTR SLA uniquely guarantees the actual time to repair each device or service, resulting in much more meaningful penalties should companies experience significant performance degradation or outages.

"Enterprises are facing more challenges than ever in assembling and maintaining a best-of-breed multi-vendor environment that provides the best possible user experience," said Mark Hansard, Virtela's vice president of systems and security.  "Virtela offers the advanced support and technology to partner with IT teams, freeing up staff to focus driving the business while relying on Virtela to deliver predictable and consistent infrastructure performance."

Other Virtela IT Infrastructure Management Benefits

Virtela provides a full lifecycle of end-to-end managed network services, from design and implementation to change management and compliance – while adeptly working with the broadest array of technologies, vendors and carriers to resolve customer IT issues through a single point of contact. Customers can also leverage the VirtelaView(SM) portal to view predictive, real-time and historical reports about their Virtela-managed IT infrastructure.

In addition to predictive analytics, Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service leverages Virtela's award-winning network management systems, multi-vendor management expertise, and cloud-based delivery via Virtela's Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC), to uniquely provide compliance, network discovery, network modeling, and other capabilities that drive further IT efficiencies:

• Audit and Compliance. The service provides centralized control of access to all devices, keeps an audit trail of all individual user logins, applies role-based discretionary access control, and is configured to mask device credentials from the user. It also features the ability to trigger an alert if unauthorized network changes take place. Integration of Virtela's audit logs with existing compliance reporting tools better enable customers to meet various compliance requirements.
• Network discovery and inventory management. The service enables enterprises to automatically identify all devices within their environment and view the topology within their Virtela dashboard.  This assists with rightsizing equipment maintenance spend, for example, enabling companies to more easily identify equipment that may be without maintenance contracts but would benefit from them, as well as equipment that may have unnecessary maintenance contracts.
• Network modeling. The service enables modeling the impact of configuration changes to the network before they are made, further reducing risk of downtime by avoiding common mistakes due to human error.

About Virtela

Virtela Technology Services Incorporated is the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company. Virtela offers an award-winning suite of services – including managed networks, security, application acceleration and proactive infrastructure management – to mid-market and Fortune 500 customers around the world. Virtela offers unparalleled geographic reach to more than 190 countries through its partnerships with more than 500 carriers.

Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with globally distributed Network Operations Centers in the U.S., India and the Philippines. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.

SOURCE Virtela