INOC's Hal Baylor Talks NOC Operations Consulting at ITW 2022

Hal Baylor, Solutions Executive at INOC, recently sat down with JSA TV on the ITW 2022 expo floor to talk about our growing NOC Operations Consulting service. Watch the full interview with JSA TV's Candace Sipos, or read the transcript below.

JSA TV
Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for data center and telecom professionals. We're here live from ITW 2022—here on the exhibit hall floor. I'm here with Hal Baylor, Solutions Executive at INOC. Welcome, Hal.

Hal Baylor
Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

JSA TV
Yeah, absolutely. We're glad to have you here. So let's just table-set a little bit to start off with here. So, if you could just tell us a little bit about INOC?

Hal Baylor
Sure. INOC is an outsourced NOC service provider and also a NOC operations consulting business.

JSA TV
Excellent. All right. So, I know you all at INOC have been speaking with the wholesale community here at ITW this week about NOC consulting. So if you could dig into that a little bit for us.

Hal Baylor
Sure. It's really become the hot topic for us and a lot of our clients. Most of our clients, especially in the telecom space, and data center space, have some sort of support component. It's usually in the form of a network operations center. And network operations centers have grown over the years organically. And there are a lot of new things going on in NOC operations center work and how they're automated, how they're set up. So really, it gets around to needing to build a framework for this, and how do you build a framework? Well, that's why we've come up with this NOC consulting practice. We've been doing this for over six years now. It's been very successful and very eye-opening to our clients. So what we do is we go in and do an assessment. And we assess the company's platform, which is really critical. Platform means that there's a lot of components to that; there is the monitoring system, which everybody knows about and does, and a ticketing system, which everybody knows about and does. And then it gets into configuration management database, the CMDB, and how accurate that is, and then digging into integrations. But also there's this new factor that's finally come of age, it's mature now. And it's called AIOps. It's automation of events or the monitoring output, and correlating all those events and all of the CMDB data to determine what's actually going on. So then you actually, once you do that, well, which is hard to do, by the way, and that's why we do consulting around it. What you see is a ticket pops up. And that's the gold standard that everybody tries to get to. So the single ticket pops up, the ticket knows what's going on, and therefore, the engineer knows what's going on. Also within the ticketing system, again, talking about platform, there's a lot of design around that and how you manage third parties, like other carriers, how you manage your staff, other third party staff, truck rolls, you know, just a litany of different components that you've got to manage through the ticketing system. But then on the other side of that you have to have good reporting. Good reporting, allows you to be able to look at KPIs or key performance indicators and metrics that allow you to manage your business. Most companies don't have that. Some have done it really well, but many haven't. We've heard the number from a number of sources that most companies CMDB, which is critically important, about 25% percent of companies have actually put together a good quality, high quality CMDB, which allows their NOC to work properly. So without that, you're typically searching for records or you make a mistake, and then you find out that you've made that mistake, and you have to correct it. So all of these things, how you put all these things together from the platform perspective is important. So it's normally people, process, platform. But that switched around. Now it's platform, process, and people. Then we get into process: how these workflows happen. And you also want to automate that within a ticketing system. This goes on and on, but there are things like runbooks that you need to develop, that you can embed those now into the ticketing systems with knowledge articles, so that those pop up with the alarm and the ticket. And then it goes into staffing—how you staff. So do you want to have a bunch of extremely knowledgeable engineers? Well, maybe that's not the most cost effective thing because simple tasks can be done by lower level engineers. So that's why you want to get into understanding what your metrics tell you at what Tier levels, how to support that, and how to run this team. So those are touch points at some of the things that we do with NOC consulting. And that's the that's the tip of the iceberg.

JSA TV
Excellent. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity with NOC consulting and in the market right now. So I heard that you're you're also talking about service catalogs with some companies that you're working with. So if you could just touch on that a little bit as well.

Hal Baylor
Sure, sure. So service catalogs are that part of the service that is defined by what a IT organization or NOC organization is supposed to perform for its customers, and a NOC organization performs for its internal customers, and its external customers, So what are those definitions of what they're supposed to do? And ITIL guides us to develop what's called a service catalog. That service catalog specifically defines service features. And once you define those service features, and vet those out into great detail, then that organization has exact and clear direction of what to do. So that service catalog is a guide point. And that can also be embedded into your ticketing platform. So it's a big piece of what people are trying to do, and they will tend to start to work on it and then get muddled down and they have too much work to do, so they don't continue it. And we can come in and help with service catalogs as well.

JSA TV
All right—awesome, Hal. Great information. And if you could just tell us where our viewers could go to learn more about INOC and your services?

Hal Baylor
It's really pretty hard to find, but if you go to INOC.com, I think you'll get there.

JSA TV
Alright, easy enough. You heard it here first. INOC.com. So thank you, Hal, for joining us today. We're happy to have you, and thank you viewers for hanging out with us for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.

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