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Network operators can no longer remain status quo - they must innovate to keep pace with user expectations for services and quality.  So what are the key areas for them to consider?

Fortunately Alcatel-Lucent has put together a highly useful study on this topic. As it says, "network service providers dealing with massive bandwidth demand are struggling to evolve their networks while keeping costs under control."

The paper finds that arriving at "cost-effective, customer-oriented" answers demands a change of perspective - "away from traditional operational preoccupations toward a view guided by financial and strategic business considerations."

Recently, TMC's Erik Linask was in Las Vegas for Interop 2010, and had a chance to interview Michelle Chan, managing director from Clearhub.

As Linask noted, Clearhub provides a mobility suite similar to that provided by BlackBerry. Chan described it as consisting of push mail, instant messaging and voice SMS, among other services.

"We realize there are a lot of people in the market who are not carrying a BlackBerry," Chan said, adding that maybe they prefer the iPhone, Nokia, Sony Ericsson or another smartphone: "We built a product that can cut across any phone and can be used anywhere.

Insurers today are growing through existing products, lines, channels, and geographic areas. They understand that a better understanding of customer needs and improved customer service increases sales and improves retention rates, which drives profitable growth.

Interactive Intelligence has released a fairly in-depth white paper, researched by SMA, a strategic advisory firm for insurance companies and providers, looking at customer communications management. CCM, the paper finds, "plays a critical role in maximizing every customer interaction to capture more information about customer needs, make timely offers, and enhance customer service."

SMA believes that CCM is most valuable "when considered holistically as the integration of all forms of communication and all types of information across the enterprise." In other words, a comprehensive CCM vision is pretty much essential today with what SMA finds to be "the advent of new customer demands, shifting demographics, and the expansion of the various devices and channels that policyholders, agents, and third-party partners use to interact with insurers."

Expand Networks has announced that its advanced WAN Optimization technology is "supporting satellite communication services for one of the world's most important centers for global science research, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego."

According to Expand officials, "deployed across one of the largest U.S. academic fleets, Expand's Accelerators are improving the performance of critical applications and communications over low-bandwidth, high-latency satellite links, enabling communications between the ships and shore." 

Earlier this month TMC's Anil Sharma reported that Expand Networks announced two additions to its Accelerator product family: the 3830 and 3930 models.

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani interviewed Jason Nolet, vice-president of application delivery products from data center networking vendor Brocade about the company's latest news.

At the show, Nolet said, the company announced something to help customers get greater control and visibility over their application performance in virtualized data centers and environments. He mentioned a new piece of software that's a member of their ServerIron ADX family, the BARB - Brocade Application Resource Broker.

Essentially what it does, according to information provided by Brocade, is provide visibility into application performance across network and VM infrastructures, and "ensure application service level agreements are met by dynamically allocating additional resources to service increases in application load."