From Alphabet Soup to Business Benefit

October 02, 2019 Arthur Nichols 2 min
Summary
In telecommunciations, acronyms come with the territory. Here's how Windstream Enterprise translates the jargon into meaningful benefits for our customers.

We’ve all fallen into the trap of telling folks what something is and assuming they can make the connection about why they should care. Technology is no exception. Telecommunications service providers are very adept at using what I call the “acronym alphabet soup.” These terms are useful and necessary to describe a vast array of technologies; however, marketers too often adopt this technical jargon, using these terms as benefits in-and-of themselves.


This approach assumes our audience understands how technologies work and that they can intuitively make the connection between them and the business challenges they solve. Unfortunately, making those connections requires some expertise in the specialized telecommunications networking domain—an expertise not possessed—or needed—by most of the audience that could benefit from it.

From technobabble to results

Networks are evolving and service providers are adopting virtualization, orchestration, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)—among other alphabet soup acronyms—to abstract network elements, automate network transactions and accelerate innovation and growth. Unfortunately, this terminology bandied-about as proof points that the technology is valuable, sounds like technobabble to business and IT leaders.

We often fail to mention how the self-service, visibility and control these technologies offer empower businesses to deliver a better customer experience and better bottom?line results. These include things like:

  • Reducing or eliminating frustrating voice and video calls due to poor quality with a network that can choose the optimal path to reduce latency, jitter and packet loss
  • Predicting and fixing future network bottlenecks through greater efficiency and flexibility to ensure effective bandwidth management and provide better capacity management tools
  • Detecting bad actors (internal and external) that threaten proprietary data by leveraging extreme levels of network visibility
  • Improving network resiliency and reliability to work around outages and get faster fixes through proactive diagnostic tools and automation for fix agents
  • Growing revenues by enabling uninterrupted communications and transactions over a network smart enough to stay connected through dynamic adaptability
  • Reducing costs via a range of factors such as better capital allocation, better bandwidth utilization and the ability to scale capacity up or down more quickly

Controlling network elements

Windstream Enterprise has gone all-in on SDN, VNF and software and network element disaggregation to empower us to orchestrate control of disparate network elements–what we call our Cloud Core Network Architecture. However, that’s not the story. As an engineer, I geek-out about how this technology works, but ultimately the reason we do it is because it empowers you, our customers, to deliver a better customer experience.

Interested in learning more? Join Windstream Enterprise, Accedian and Heavy Reading for an informative webinar, “From static to programmable: Leveraging the next wave of virtualization to deliver secure end-to-end applications.”

Tuesday, October 15, 2019
1:00 pm ET | 12:00 pm CT | 11:00 am MT | 10:00 am PT
Register now

Key Takeaway
Windstream Enterprise has gone all-in on SDN, VNF Cloud Core, innovations designed to empower our customers to deliver a better customer experience.

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