Progress Software Corporation, a leading software provider that enables companies to be operationally responsive, announced the availability of the new Progress® Integrated Trouble Management (ITM) solution accelerator. This new offering bolsters the Progress communications solutions portfolio and empowers communication service providers to enhance their customers’ overall experience.  The ITM solution accelerator  provides communication service providers with end-to-end management and rules-based problem resolution for customer initiated problems.  It also enables the preemptive identification of problems so that operations managers can limit or completely remove any negative impact on their customers.

With the continual introduction of new service offerings across multiple ''siloed' operations and businesses, managing issues (‘trouble’) on an end-to-end basis is increasingly complex. Traditional trouble management systems typically have strong issue capturing capabilities, but struggle to effectively resolve and track these issues across multiple organizations. The Progress ITM solution accelerator  claims that it enables the communication service providers to manage and resolve issues quickly and consistently across boundaries, often before customers even realize they have a problem.

Maureen Fleming, vice president of IDC’s business process management and middleware research services, said: "The complexity of guaranteeing that communications customers are provided the services they signed up for is close to impossible without overlay systems that provide a customer-centric view of an end-to-end transaction. Over the next several years, control systems that detect problems in real time and track and manage the decisions about how to resolve them will grow far faster than the underlying applications. They are the only realistic way to manage a large-scale process from a customer's point of view."

The Progress ITM solution accelerator also empowers communication service providers to offer a single point of response for customer issues across all businesses and domains. Built on the Progress Responsive Process Management™ platform, the Progress ITM solution accelerator helps firms leverage their existing business and operational support systems (B/OSS) by using an adaptive layer that extends their existing infrastructure investment. 

Sanjay Kumar, industry vice president, Communications and Media, Progress Software, said: "When an issue arises that can negatively impact a customer, service assurance managers need to resolve it quickly to ensure their company offers the best service experience for their customers.  To do that, it’s imperative to have the appropriate level of visibility into any potential problem that could affect their customers.  They also need to have the capability -- at their fingertips -- to correct it.  With the right tools, communication service providers can improve their service and build a stronger, long-term relationship with their customers." 

The Progress ITM solution accelerator includes; immediate 360 visibility into all service assurance operations extending across systems, processes, customers, suppliers and partners; powerful business rules-based analysis and problem resolution with both predefined processes for pre-emptive action against expected issues and dynamically created processes for unexpected events; real-time tracking against user defined SLAs and KPIs, with alerts when violations occur; strong flexibility and adaptability enabling continuous evolution of all service assurance processes that can be seamlessly shared with other departments (i.e., service fulfillment, billing…)