Driving ISP Profitability:
Automated Configuration Management

Internet Paradox: The explosive growth of the Internet is well documented and the hype surrounding this growth is unprecedented. If the potential of the Net is unlimited, why are so few ISPs turning a profit?

by Jonathan Wolf [February 16, 2001]

Jonathan Wolf, president and chief executive officer, co-founded Gold Wire Technology in 1999. With more than 12 years of experience in computer networking and application development, Wolf is a recognized expert in configuration management. Gold Wire Technology delivers software that enables ISPs to control and manage the configuration of the Internet. During his career Wolf has also held engineering and engineering management posts with Cambridge Technology Group, Codex, and Opus Telecom. Wolf holds both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from MIT.

The answer to this question lies not in the scale, hype or potential of the Internet, but in the mundane day-to-day operation of it. In the last five years ISPs have made tremendous investments in building out their network infrastructures. While these efforts have been wildly successful in providing ever-increasing bandwidth and network capacity, there has not been a commensurate level of success in the development and delivery of tools that can help them manage this infrastructure efficiently.

Future ISP profitability will hinge on the delivery of these tools to the marketplace. The ability to utilize these tools will determine whether an ISP can achieve two objectives:

1. Build better, low-cost and more efficient operations
2. Build faster, more reliable deployment of revenue-generating services

Today, many ISPs operate large, unprofitable networks that take an enormous amount of highly skilled manpower to manage and maintain. At the same time, they are under immense pressure from capital markets to begin generating real returns on investments of their network build-outs. The challenge facing ISPs today lies not in the continued buildout of their networks, but in managing what they've already built.

One of the most vexing problems facing them is managing the thousands of routers, switches and other devices they've deployed in their networks. The configuration and management of these devices is currently done manually, one at a time, by operations personnel. This practice is not conducive to profitable operations because it is prone to human error, thus creating service outages.

Manual device configuration practices are also time-consuming, which slows the rollout of money-making services that cannot scale in accordance with the business plan, physically or economically.

The ability to replace these manual configuration practices with automated ones will be critical as ISPs seek to make the evolutionary transition from infrastructure buildout to profitable operation. Those that can find ways to efficiently configure and control their network infrastructures will be able to roll out new services faster and manage existing ones better, giving them a distinct competitive advantage over ISPs clinging to current manual configuration management practices. This article addresses the critical need for ISPs to adopt automated configuration management tools and techniques, in order to foster profitable operations.

Network complexity grows
On the one hand, their networks are evolving at an extremely rapid pace. At the same time, their networks are looking more and more like those of their competitors. Indeed, one can easily see a day in the not-too-distant future when all ISP networks will have virtually the same infrastructure technologies in place.

In this environment, where network infrastructure is rapidly approaching commodity status, the ability to roll out and manage complex services in an efficient and profitable manner will become the most important core competency of ISP operations. We are already seeing the deployment of these services today, with virtual private networks (VPNs), Extranets, voice over IP, Application Service Providers (ASP) and so on. However, the management tools required to derive acceptable profits from these services are not yet widely available. This is especially true in the case of configuration management tools, which only now are beginning to reach the marketplace.

As a result, rolling out and managing these services continues to be a complex and labor-intensive process. For example, to deploy a single VPN, ISPs must configure and manage all of the appropriate devices in the network, as well as interconnections within the network, between the network and the ISP and between the ISP and other providers. They also need to provide access control, security and appropriate functionality for a broad range of end-users, including the customer, engineers, ISP operations personnel, etc.

Multiply this single VPN deployment by thousands of VPN deployments, and the complexity reaches staggering proportions. Multiply this again by the rollout of other complex services, and it is easy to understand why manual device configuration management practices simply cannot continue.

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