One of the reasons given for Michael Dell re-claiming the CEO mantle at Dell last week was the realization that customer service standards had slipped, and need to be restored.

In our ZDNet neighborhood, as well as in the blogosphere and among friends and neighbors, this perception has taken on a disturbingly common truism: bought a Dell, had a problem, called customer service, got someone in India, they weren’t especially helpful.

Oftentimes this lack of helpfulness is blamed on confusing directions, other times on language and diction issues.

While I am quite uncomfortable with attacking people for the way they speak, I do have to wonder why Dell has been tone-deaf to the criticisms about problem with their Tier I consumer-level tech support. Perhaps it is because it has been part of their corporate lore that the money saved by outsourcing this support overseas will successfully influence the bottom line and then the stock price.

But perhaps not. The decline in Dell’s stock price is a key reason cited for Michael Dell’s return. It is his name on the door, you know.

Michael’s off to a good start, cutting bonuses and trimming management layers. But he needs to do more.

So in light of these problems, I would suggest that Michael Dell and key staffers look at bringing consumer tech support back to the U.S.A. Such an evaluation should not be performed strictly as a cost-benefit analysis based on quantifiable expenditure factors, but with sensitivity for the sales lost as former customers bolt and tell their friends to, as well.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=1426

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As more carriers and cable companies dip their toes into the market for bandwidth-hungry IPTV and video-on-demand services, they will have to improve the weakest link in the service delivery chain: the core of the carrier’s network.

Juniper Networks and Intelliden have teamed up to help by bridging the gap between quality-of-service mechanisms and policies to allow service providers to dynamically allocate more bandwidth to those high-bandwidth applications as they traverse the core of the carrier network.

The two companies will jump out ahead of the demand curve on Jan. 24 by launching their combined Dynamic Networking Automation offering for bandwidth-hungry IP services.

The DNA offering was created by integrating Juniper’s SDX (Service Deployment System) platform for its carrier switches and Intelliden’s Dynamic Resource Provisioning software.

Together they deliver policy and real-time network resource management into the core of the network, now the weakest point in the carrier’s network, according to Rahul Sachdev, vice president of marketing at Intelliden, in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Until now a lot of those problems that have been addressed have been at the edge of the network—not the core. We are extending intelligence to the core to set quality of service, control bandwidth and so on,” he said.

Carriers to this point have thrown bandwidth at the core of the network to ensure enough resources during peak times. Those practices will no longer scale or be economical when carriers begin to offer more bandwidth-intensive services such as video on demand, IPTV and VOIP (voice over IP).

The integration work was driven by joint customer Telus, a small but innovative carrier in Western Canada. Telus was looking for a way to bridge the communications gap between those responsible for policy creation and those that handle day-to-day network operations, according to Brian Lakey, director of OSS architecture and strategy at Telus, in Edmonton, Alberta.

“The network provides quality-of-service metrics through [Multiprotocol Label Switching]. This is about merging the policy with those end-to-end controls and keeping them in sync. Policy is based on an accurate representation of QOS, and it can be dynamically reprovisioned to meet policy needs,” he said.

“The needs between different sites change,” Sachdev said. “You have to flex the network in real time to support different policies for different applications for different users. Today there is no integrated way to do that across the end-to-end network.”

As carriers move beyond smaller pilots for high-bandwidth services such as IPTV, the need for such flexibility will grow, believes Larry Goldman, co-founder of OSS Observer in Sugar Grove, Ill.

“This is ahead of the real demand, but it’s indicative of where things are going,” he said. “There are hundreds of service providers in the world all intending to offer video on-demand services. The usage of video on telco networks is still comparatively low, but it’s growing rapidly. The usage of the network will dramatically change because each individual service will be much more bandwidth-intensive and service providers are anticipating billions of subscribers.”

The joint DNA offering will use the APIs in Juniper’s SDX platform to allow dynamic resource awareness in the network and allow dynamic provisioning of network elements and paths based on real-time application requirements.

DNA is due early in the second half of the year.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2086931,00.asp?kc=EWRSS04069TX1K0000701

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