According to network studies and surveys, including the Gartner Group, 70% of network and system management tools fail to be fully implemented - even after 3 years of work!

Additionally, many of today's network management centers have been shaped in a piecemeal fashion, with applications chosen to perform specific tasks for one particular network element. As a result, such centers are often not fully automated, and contain a large number of applications that are difficult to manage and that do not share information across technology domains.

Network management is one of our companies strengths and specialization. Whether your company is upgrading its current NOC, communications technology, or implementing a new network infrastructure - we can help!

Pate’s network management design and implementation services begin with an assessment of your current network architecture and network management tools and processes. Based on our assessment and on your input, we jointly develop recommendations on how to bring your network operations (NOC) in line with the unique needs of your business.

Our approach is weighted heavily towards simplicity in NOC operations, network status reporting, and reporting procedures – even when the underlying network infrastructure is very complex. We typically achieve this simplicity through consolidation and integration of network management systems.

This service is focused on identifying the root causes of network and application performance problems.

Very often, when one component in a network or a system fails, a chain reaction is started where the core problem causes other components to signal that they too are malfunctioning. The Network Operations Center (NOC) in turn, becomes flooded with misleading fault or alarm messages. In reality, the overwhelming majority of these messages are misleading because they do not point to the core problem. Once the core problem has been corrected, the flood of fault messages will stop.

Pate’s fault and alarm analysis solutions allow network managers to quickly pinpoint the root causes of network and application performance problems. Our approach uses fault correlation and network modeling techniques and commercially available software. At the end of every assignment we typically leave our clients with a sustainable operational processes to identify root cause problems and manage fault messages.

Our preferred approach is to start off by looking at network and application performance from the end-user perspective. Any performance degradation is then correlated, in real-time, with traffic on the network and with system and application resources. This correlation allows our clients to immediately identify the causes of problems proactively, and fine-tune their networks or application performance before they adversely affect their business.

Under this service, Pate’s consultants use sophisticated modeling and capacity planning techniques to evaluate the ability of a client's network infrastructure to accommodate new business applications.

An understanding of how business applications behave on the network is essential for predicting the response times that users will experience when the applications are deployed under "real world" conditions. After profiling an application, our consultants typically make a series of recommendations on how the application and/or its deployment can be improved to more effectively utilize network resources.

Related services include:

	Pre-deployment application profiling, predictive modeling, and capacity planning
	Application/network compatibility assessment and optimization
	Network design, planning and reconfiguration
	Implementation and project management expertise and ongoing operations support

Pate has experience with the following technologies:

	Platforms: HP, Sun, IBM, Client-Server, NCR, Mainframe
	OS/Languages: UNIX, Solaris, Perl, Windows, NT, Java, HTML, C, C++, VB, VC++, CICS, IMS and RPG/400
	RDBMs: Oracle, Informix, Sybase, SQL, and DB2
	MiddleWare/Tools: CORBA, Tuxedo, JDBC, ODBC
	Telecomm/Networking: OSS, TCP/IP, TDMS, SNMP, CMIP, ATM, SONET, Frame Relay, TMN Q3, Wireless, Routers, Hubs, HP OpenView, Tivoli, Micromuse
	Routing protocols: IGRP, EIGRP, IGMP, DVMP, CIDR, BGP-4, OSPF, PNNI, MPOA, RSVP, MPLS, RIP, and RIPv2.

Pate Consultants Group network usage-based billing and cost allocation solutions allow businesses to analyze network expenditures in terms of costs and benefits. Our billing solutions allow network managers to identify network users, assign costs to network usage, and assign costs to the appropriate business units.

As a result, clients are able to utilize and consume network resources more efficiently, advocate or defend infrastructure investments more effectively, and make better informed decisions regarding future network evolution.