Verizon’s Rapid Delivery Initiative Improves Efficiency and the Customer Experience

Cindy Whelan

Summary Bullets:

• Verizon has completely redesigned its service delivery model, fundamentally changing its approach and supporting technologies, as well as organization and process flows.
• The initiative, dubbed ‘Rapid Delivery,’ has increased operational efficiency, leading to reductions in the time required for quotes, orders and contracting.  Tightened data integrity means greater accuracy throughout the sales process.

Improving the customer experience is on every carrier’s radar.  One of the charges often levied against very large carriers (and large companies in general for that matter) is that it’s often difficult to get things done.  If there is a service or billing error, resolution can become a time-consuming, frustrating effort for the customer.  Over the last several years, a number of providers have invested in initiatives to improve customer self-service tools such as portals as well as internal tools used by sales and support teams.  Revamping the customer engagement process from pre-sales through deployment and ongoing support is a daunting task for any provider, but for carriers that have grown through acquisition, consolidating multiple systems and processes acquired over many years adds another layer of complexity to an already sensitive, complicated mission.  Verizon is one of those providers that has taken on the challenge; so far, it seems to be making exceptional headway in its efforts.

Three Bits of Advice from Discussing the Impact of VMware’s NSX at VMworld

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

• Networking vendors need to embrace homogeneity and provide frictionless integration with virtual environments. Your value add occurs below the hypervisor layer.
• Networking vendors—any vendor for that matter—should integrate with as many platforms as possible. Remove a barrier to adoption and you’ll reach a wider audience.

Embrace homogeneity. While walking the expo floor at VMworld last week, I spent a lot of time talking to vendors about software defined networking and what VMware’s NSX platform meant. There’s a surprising amount of confusion about what SDN is and how vendors can make the most of it, but the simplest way I can make sense of NSX is homogeneity. Server virtualization and all the processes make a data center dynamic like VM motions, robust storage, and scale-up/in/out architectures rely on running VMs being oblivious to what is happening underneath them. The virtual world is homogenous. It doesn’t matter if the CPU is from Intel or AMD. It doesn’t matter if the storage is FC or iSCSI based. Regardless of where a VM runs, the platform it sees is the same. That enables enterprises to swap out a FC SAN with an iSCSI array with nary a hiccup in the VM.