Telcordia this week debuted a new network management platform it believes can add true “five-nines” capabilities to IP networks – and it says it has customer trials at some of the world’s most security- and reliability-minded enterprises to prove it.

How that translates for the service provider market remains to be seen, Telcordia admits. But the product, dubbed IP Assure, has helped bring greater levels of reliability to some of the world’s most sophisticated enterprise IP networks – capabilities that carrier IP networks are going to need, and fast, said Rajesh Talpade, chief scientist in Telcordia’s advanced technology group.

“What we have in IP Assure is a product focused on IP network management -- more specifically, it’s designed to detect configuration issues in IP network devices,” said Talpade. “The benefit is improving the security, availability and regulatory compliance capabilities of IP networks. It takes off where configuration management products leave off.”

According to Talpade, today’s multivendor IP networks feature a mish-mash of products each with their own configuration information as well as one-off scripts enabling custom configurations. IP Assure takes as its input that configuration and deciphers vendor- and device-specific information (for example, from routers, switches and firewalls) and analyzes that data against a built-in rules database based on factors such as industry best practices, regulatory requirements and customer-specific policies. It also pulls in data from network inventory, discovery and monitoring devices to provide an even more complete view of network conditions.

The end result is a living, breathing network management layer that automates network error detection and remediation to keep IP networks running at an optimum level, said Talpade.

Telcordia has proved the capabilities of IP Assure in high-profile deployments at the Securities Exchange Commission in the US and several other undisclosed government agencies worldwide.

While service providers increasingly offer service level agreements on IP networks – especially for enterprise customers – those SLA guarantees and quality of service goals are meaningless if network operators can’t keep the underlying network running at a better than “best-effort” rate, Talpade said.

“I think network service providers will need to adopt solutions like IP Assure very quickly,” he said, adding that “it’s not clear they are ready to go down that path yet. The level of service provider [IP networks] is still best-effort at the retail level.”

In the meantime, to reach the large enterprises that are more likely to need better-than-best-effort IP networking, Telcordia plans to market IP Assure to those large users through service providers -- which can host it -- and system integrators -- which would install the solution on-site.