Platform architecture geared specifically for Service Assurance

Delivering a managed service is hard but buying and using a managed network service should be easy. Enterprise customers expect their network service provider to be able to shield them from the problems they would encounter by managing their network in-house. They also expect their service provider to be able to provide proof of delivery when it comes to the services being provided.

The Highlight cloud representing service assurance architecture.

Designed precisely to support delivery of managed services

The need for service assurance

Traditional network monitoring tools just don’t deliver the required experience. They are designed for engineering roles and are usually narrowly focused on the technical management of a single network environment, instead of the collaborative commercial relationship of a managed network service.

The Highlight Service Assurance Platform is designed precisely around this environment, and always has been. Our goal from day one, twenty years ago, has been to support and enhance the relationship between service providers and the enterprise customers that use their services.

Multi-tenant business-aligned access structure

Groups, Teams, Customers, Divisions, Locations – the Highlight platform speaks business as well as technical, letting you organise networks and resources in a way you understand, with full security where it’s needed, but over-arching views for users with the right access:

  • As a service provider – Get a single overview of your entire customer base and split it by team, geography or any other basis. Empower both technical and non-technical roles, such as operations teams, service managers and sales teams with accessible and understandable performance data.
  • As an enterprise organisation – Enable IT managers to see the whole of your network estate, with multiple providers in a single screen, and provide controlled access to division heads or location staff.

No limit on user numbers

Our mission is to enable better conversations between service provider and enterprise, so we want you to get people talking. You can add as many users as you want to Highlight – there’s no per-user or per-seat charge. The more people you include in your Highlight visibility, the more you get out of it.

  • Add people in your service or Ssles teams. Highlight is ideal for high-churn or first-line teams because a new user can be productive in minutes – no detailed training needed.
  • As an enterprise IT user or reseller, add your upstream providers so you can talk to them about what they’re delivering.
  • If you’re an enterprise using Highlight across multiple locations, give Highlight access to users at those locations, empowering them to check the status or network behaviour on the broadband or cellular links they rely on. You’ll get fewer helpdesk calls!

Vendor agnostic, service orientated single pane of glass

Modern network services usually need to incorporate multiple technologies from a multitude of third-party vendors. This allows service providers to give their customers the capabilities that they desire but third-party applications drastically increase the difficulty of reporting, requiring service managers to gather and combine information from multiple data sources, often needing to rely on engineering teams to do so.

The Highlight platform supports a large and always increasing range of different technologies and third-party applications, translating vendor-specific data into a view that represents a unified service. Customers shouldn’t need to engage directly with third-party suppliers and don’t want to be logging into lots of different portals, they just want one place they can go to for their network service. That’s where the Highlight platform excels.

In the cloud but controllable

Usually, when you buy into a cloud service, changes just happen, whether you like them or want them, or not. If you’re depending on the service or reselling it, that can be a problem. If you’re a Highlight partner, you get access to a sandbox environment before each update, where you can check out new features and make sure your staff, and your customers, are ready.

Every significant new feature is switchable, so you get complete control over which features are available to your customers and, using the same business-based approach, you can control this availability down to individual customer level. Want to trial cellular visibility with one key customer? Make detailed service reporting a facility for UK customers but not elsewhere? All part of the Highlight solution.

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