HP Network Management Advances Heighten Performance
While Reducing Total Costs for Nordic Telco TDC
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP network tools help companies adapt to the
new style of IT to deliver better user experiences.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big
data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how TDC is using network-management
improvements to better manage and get better performance from their networks across several
Nordic countries. To explain how they’re doing that, we’re joined by Lars Niklasson, the Senior
Consultant at TDC in Stockholm. Welcome, Lars.
Lars Niklasson: Thank you.
Gardner: First of all, tell us about TDC, what you do, and how large your installations are.
Niklasson: TDC is an operator in the Nordic region, where we have a network covering Norway,
Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. In Sweden, we’re also an integrator and have a quite big
consultant role in Sweden.
Gardner: And you have a number of main businesses in your organization. There’s TDC
Solutions and mobile. There’s even television and some other hosting. Explain for us how large
your organization is. It sounds quite big.
Niklasson: Yeah, in Sweden we’re around 800 people, and the whole TDC group is almost
10,000 people.
Gardner

Gardner: So it’s obviously a very significant network to support this business and deliver the
telecommunication services. Maybe you could define your network for us.
Niklasson: It's quite big, over 50,000 devices, and everything is monitored of course. It’s a state-
of-the-art network.
Gardner: When you have so many devices to track, so many types of layers of
activity and levels of network operations, how do you approach keeping track
of that and making sure that you’re not only performing well, but performing
efficiently?
Niklasson: Many years ago, we implemented Network Node Manager (NNM)
and we have several network operating centers in all countries using NNM.
When HP released different smart plug-ins, we started to implement those too
for the different areas that they support, such as quality assurance, traffic, and
so on.
Gardner: So you’ve been using HP for your network management and HP Network
Management Center for some time, and it has of course evolved over the years. What are some
of the chief attributes that you like or requirements that you have for network operations, and
why has the HP product been so strong for you?
Quick and easy
Niklasson: One thing is that it has to be quick and easy to manage. We have lots of changes all
the time, especially in Sweden, when a customer comes. And in Sweden, we’re monitoring end
customers’ networks.
It's also very important to be able to integrate it with the other systems that we
have. So we can, for example, tell which service-level agreement (SLA) a
particular device has and things like that. NNM makes this quite efficient.
Gardner: One of the things that I’ve heard people struggle with is the amount
of data that’s generated from networks that then they need to be able to sift
through and discover anomalies. Is there something about visualization or other ways of
digesting so much data that appeals to you?
Niklasson: NNM is quite good at finding the root cause. You don’t get very many incidents
when something happens. If I look back at other products and older versions, there were lots and
lots of incidents and alarms. Now, I find it quite easy to manage and configure NNM so it's
monitoring the correct things and listening to the correct traps and so on.
Niklasson

Gardner: TDC uses network management capabilities and also sells it. They also provide it with
their telecom services. How have you experienced the use in the field? Do any of your customers
also manage their own networks and how has this been for your consumers of network services?
Niklasson: We’re also an HP partner in selling NNM to end customers. Part of my work is
helping customers implement this in their own environment. Sometimes a customer doesn’t want
to do that. They buy the service from us, and we monitor the network. It’s for different reasons.
One could be security, and they don’t allow us to access the network remotely. They prefer to
have it in-house, and I help them with these projects.
Gardner: Lars, looking to the future, are there any particular types of technology improvements
that you would like to see or have you heard about some of the roadmaps that HP has for the
whole Network Management Center Suite? What interests you in terms of what's next?
Niklasson: I would say two things. One is the application visibility in the network, where we can
have some of that with traffic that’s cleaner, but it's still NetFlow-based. So I’m interested in
seeing more deep inspection of the traffic and also more virtualization of the virtual
environments that we have.
Gardner: All right. I think that’s about all we have time for. I’d really like to thank you for your
time. We have been here with Lars Niklasson. He is the Senior Consultant at TDC in Stockholm.
Thank you so much.
Niklasson: Thank you.
Gardner: And I’d also like to thank our audience for joining us for this special new style of IT
discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP network tools help companies adapt to the
new style of IT to deliver better user experiences. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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