Network management is becoming increasingly important as new products are introduced and we move away from the traditional circuit-switched environment and into a data environment. As more products are introduced, you have to know what's on the network. You won't create satisfied customers by promising a new feature and then discovering that it can't be provisioned. You can't sell DSL if the local loop won't support it. Network and component health.
New products mean new elements on the network.
If you have intelligent and sophisticated applications in place to recognize and monitor new elements, you can create strategies to keep your network strong. The whole concept of monitoring becomes even more important as you consider the fact that the life cycles of products are becoming shorter and shorter. That means an even faster rate of change in the network inventory. The next step is to develop redundant paths between the customer and two or more CEVs. With that, and the ability to monitor the health of elements within the CEVs, it will often be possible to detect problems before they become outages and switch to an alternate path to the customer.