1. Managed Network
How does a Managed Network solution help a business like yours?

2. Retailer Challenges
Retailers know they need to devote more of their focus to the customer experience initiatives that their company needs to be successful in today’s retail industry. But as they move towards developing those technologies, a few challenges can get in their way.
First, their TACTICAL daily network operations demand a majority of their resources, leaving them with limited staff and time to reach these goals. Gartner refers this as “dead money”, because it just goes to keeping the lights on.
Next, the heightened attention on retail SECURITY attacks means their own exposure is top-of-mind to their organization, and they’re looking for answers
And through all of this, they’re facing consumers with radically increased expectations for how they shop at and interact with their stores. And 70% of retail CIOs feel they are at or below par in terms of strategic use of IT.
The majority of your peers are struggling, despite their best efforts, to balance everyday upkeep and security with broader efforts at engaging with customers through technology. So while you’re faced with huge opportunity, you’re also being weighed down by the necessities of your core IT responsibilities.
There are real downsides to under-investing in customer focused strategy. A recent Forrester study found that companies that lagged in investing in their
customer experience saw a 34% decrease in their stock performance over a six year period.
Sources:
80% Dead Money: Daryl Plummer, Gartner, in Line-of-business tech budgets may soon top IT department budgets, ZDNet, 2011.
70% CIOs below Par: The New Cost Structure of Retail IT, EKN, 2013
34% Decline: The Business Impact of Customer Experience, Kerry Bodine and Moira Dorsey, Forrester, 2014.
80%
"Eight out of 10 dollars spent on IT is 'dead money' because it goes to just keeping the lights on.“ -Daryl Plummer, Gartner

3. Imagine if You Could Shift Your Resources
What if you free up the resources currently focused on the day-to-day, and reallocate them to the true priorities of your business.
Then, you can move some of these available resources to address the increasing security threats.
And you could focus more of your staff and time on the growth initiatives that your company is relying on you to deliver.
When you can do that, you can refocus your team and budget on capturing business intelligence and supporting the customer experience initiatives that will provide business value across your organization.
That same Forrester research report found that companies that invested in the customer experience saw a 43% increase in stock portfolio performance.

4. Lower your Network Management burden
Get the dedicated people, processes and tools to manage your network end-to-end.
Keep your network running at peak performance so your customers are happy and employees productive.
Managed Network service help lower your burden of management, as EarthLink provides the dedicated people, processes and tools to manage your network end-to-end.
This service helps keep your network running at peak performance which keeps your customers happy and your employees productive.
We can support both the networks provided by EarthLink and those provided by other network service providers.

5. Why EarthLink Managed Network?
Add Skilled Resources:  Focus your internal staff on key business initiatives. With an experienced and dedicated Network Engineer and Service Delivery Manager to augment the running of your own network operations center.
Achieve Faster Resolution: We proactively monitor your network and take immediate action to resolve all your network and on-premises equipment issues.
Guarantee Results: Our SLAs are the best in the industry, and are backed by financial commitments if we fail to deliver.
Gain Visibility: The myLink portal gives you network visibility.
Earthlink is one of only a few Managed Network Service providers to dedicate both a Service Delivery Manager and a Network Engineer to support your network. These skilled resources function as an extension of your team, and allows your operations team to focus on more strategic initiatives. You don’t need to build or staff your own NOC, which can result in substantial cost savings.
We are proactively monitoring your network and helping you achieve faster resolution to keep you applications running at peak performance.
We guarantee our service with SLAs that have “teeth”, we meet our SLAs or face financial penalties.
We provide an on-line, real-time, dashboard so you can view the status and performance of your network from any device at any time, so you never lose control of what's happening.

6. Managed Network Service
Silver
Platinum
UP / Down Monitoring (5 minute pings)
Managed CPE
24x7 Support Team
Proactive Hard Down ticketing
Next Business Day CPE replacement
CPE Configuration Backup
Enhanced Performance Reporting
Highly skilled technicians with deep understanding of your network:
24x7X365 Support Team
Enhanced Equipment and Route Configuration Management
Network Event Correlation (log retention)
Proactive Fault Identification, Fault Isolation and Fault Resolution
Assigned Network Engineer & Service Manager
Proactive Monitoring & Management of MPLS network including detailed end to end monitored thresholds
Latency
Jitter
Packet Loss
2 levels of Managed Network to choose from. Select the level that best meets your business requirements.
We can get into the details of each feature when you are interested to dive deeper.
Silver – included with every MPLS network
Platinum – a white glove service option to keep your network running at peak performance

7. Managed Network Feature Details
Personalized support from an assigned technical team
In-depth understanding of your network and how best to support
Ticket generation, tracked to closure
Proactive Remediation or Isolation
Remediation for all fixes
Direct to Tech communication
Escalation
Proactive Notification
Any customer impacting events
Customer selected contact method
Reporting/Single Pane of Glass
myLink portal gives our clients a single view of all their products and services including tools to monitor and manage these services”
Real time and historical tracking
Event Monitoring
Automatic 24/7 real-time detection
Tailored communication
Daily, weekly interaction
Filtering & Correlation
Correlate multiple events for probable root cause and severity
Response based on event priority
Tailored focus to help our customers meet their business objectives
Operational Effectiveness
Early Notification of Issues improve ticket resolution times
On-going common cause isolation/proactive analytics to remedy issues before customer are impacted.

8. SLAs – Managed Network Silver Platinum
PE to PE network availability = %
Jitter <1ms
Latency <45ms
Ping CPE for up/down every 5 minutes
3 consecutive failures results in auto-ticket generation and customer notification
Mean time to restore
ADSL Circuits Hours
T-1 or Greater Hours
Up to 15% credit of 1 month MRR per site
End-to-end network availability = %
Alarm acknowledgement / customer notification all alarms
Minor Minutes
Major Minutes
Critical 15 Minutes
Up to 25% credit of 1 month service MRR per site
Regardless of level of Managed Network service, the network SLAs for availability, Jitter and Latency are the same. End-to-end means form PE to PE (Provider Edge Router, and don’t include the last mile of access)
Silver SLAs and include a 15% MRR credit per site.
Platinum SLAs provide SLASs for time to notify based on minor, major, critical (definitions to be added here) and credits up to 25% MRR per site

9. Visibility with myLink
myLink portal provides a Network Dashboard showing status of all locations. Able to monitor network traffic and availability by location.
myLink is a highly flexible tool and you can customize your dashboard to feature whichever metrics are most important to your business.
Real-time metrics
Network dashboards
Utilization
Availability

10. How a Business Benefits
Fast Food Restaurant Chain
25 Locations on MPLS network
Centralized and small operations staff
Supporting critical POS and WiFi applications
Limited visibility into network performance
Needed to respond faster to network issues
Complaints from employees and customers on application availability
Implemented Platinum Level Managed Network service
Removed burden from operations team, refocused on strategic projects
Improved network uptime and application performance
Network status dashboard always on
Fewer network issues, and those issues corrected faster
Significantly less employee & customer complaints
Let me give you an example of a business situation that highlights how a Managed Service solution solves typical challenges.

11. Helping You Achieve Key Benefits
Let’s discuss further how your business can benefit from a Managed Network Service tailored to meet your needs.
In summary – Managed Networks can offer the following benefits:
Addition of skilled resources which become an extension of your team
Enables you to refocus resources onto more strategic initiatives – which leads to supporting advances in improving the customer experience
Increased network reliability guaranteed by SLAs – which means faster resolution on network issues. Ensure that all your mission critical store operations are running at peak performance at all times.
Which means you can eliminate the costs of running your own network operations center
Next Steps? Let us help you by proposing a Managed Network Solution tailored to your business needs
Skilled Resources
Refocus staff
Network reliability & Guarantees
Reduce Costs