Helping Providers and Customers Work Better Together

Conversations are hard when there’s not much to talk about. We built Highlight to help the people who provide services talk to the people who consume them. Have the same, easily-scannable picture on your screen and theirs, and talk about it. Look at how your usage levels are growing here, and here. Sorry about that outage last week — see, Monday evening? I chased it up and here’s what we found. If you introduce ICT, as you mentioned, then these three sites won’t have enough performance — see? We should talk about an upgrade. That slowdown you mentioned? it’s a pattern — see? every Friday afternoon. Highlight enables productive communication that creates mutually beneficial and commercial successful outcomes. Stay on the same page — literally — and have more relevant conversations with your customers.

A common first reaction to seeing Highlight is “We already have that capability”. What they mean is “Engineering has tools that can get this”. Our next question is simply, how often do your sales teams use those tools? If you have a portal, how often do your customers log in to it? It’s ironic that the people who can actually drive commercial outcomes (on both sides of the provider/consumer relationship) usually don’t have access to operational tools, and wouldn’t have the deep technical skills to interpret the information if they did.

Highlight puts clear crisp information in the hands of people who run that relationship and make commercial decisions — a unique, graphical, single-pane-of-glass interface that is focused on relevant and meaningful insights.

The biggest issues in our market appear when service providers try to repurpose enterprise monitoring tools to work in their environment. Proper multi-tenancy is hard to do, and enterprise tools are not designed to help teams that deliver a paid-for service — it’s a very different set of priorities. Highlight is designed to help service providers support dozens or thousands of customers effortlessly. And things that make the SP environment unique, like Service Levels, Maintenance Windows, Product Names, MSOs are all there, so you don’t need to spend time customising or doing integration work bending a badly-fitting tool to fit your environment. We’ve had partners that go from “Sign us up!” to “This is a whole new view of our customers!” in 48 hours.

Everything about Highlight is built to make accessing the right information easy. Central to that outcome is a single-pane-of-glass interface — one login providing all the information every different stakeholder might need and covering a full range of technologies. You can review your entire IT estate with a bird’s-eye-view, and then zoom in to investigate the details when needed. Providing all of this in a cloud-based solution creates a centralised hub that can be accessed at any time, anywhere. Operational tools may still be essential for your engineers to keep the lights on, and platforms like SD-WAN come with a free portal — but they’re usage- or technology-specific, and not designed for business people. Network connectivity needs to be end-to-end, so your picture of it should be too.