LivingObjects with Bertrand Le Marec
Bertrand Le Marec
Vice President
LiveAction’s Service Provider Business Unit
As part of LiveAction’s continued growth and global expansion, the company recently acquired the service provider network monitoring technology of LivingObjects. We spoke with Bertrand Le Marec, founder of LivingObjects about the acquisition and what it means for service providers and the industry.
Q. What were the business and technical drivers behind starting LivingObjects?
A. When I started LivingObjects, we set out to tackle a specific and significant challenge in network management for service providers and the enterprises they serve – monitoring application performance. With digital transformation and the proliferation of on-premise and cloud applications putting more demands on the network came the need for greater visibility into application performance. If you’ve ever experienced a jittery VoIP session or lost a video conferencing connection, you know how critical application performance is to productivity and the reputation of a service provider.
Q. What does this acquisition mean for service providers?
A. It enables them to take advantage of a dedicated service provider business unit. One that’s focused on empowering service providers to consistently and clearly demonstrate their value to enterprise customers.
Q. Does LivingObjects also support enterprises?
A. Technically, yes. We do this through our relationships with service providers. While LivingObjects has successfully supported enterprises and service providers, our solution quickly caught on among large service providers throughout Europe.
Q. What is it about the “eye.lo” platform that led to its popularity among service providers and the success of LivingObjects?
A. Service providers realized that having application-aware network monitoring is crucial for running their business and delivering great customer experiences. Yet it’s not easy. It requires a specific expertise and oftentimes it prompts service providers to use a variety of application monitoring tools. This gets complicated quickly. That’s where our eye.lo network monitoring platform proved itself. The platform removes the complexity associated with using multiple technologies to monitor applications.
Q. What happens to eye.lo now that it’s part of LiveAction?
A. eye.lo is now known as “LiveSP”. LiveSP enables application visibility via the router to give service providers complete awareness of performance state all in one pane of glass. The platform is currently used every day by tens of thousands of customers across hundreds of thousands of managed routers.
As the foundation for LiveAction’s new Service Provider business unit, LiveSP provides service providers with more control, confidence and flexibility to offer new and differentiated services to customers.
Q. Tell us more about LiveAction’s new Service Provider Business Unit.
A. To further empower service providers, LiveAction has formed a Service Provider Business Unit through the acquisition of LivingObjects’ technology platform. Going forward, LiveSP is the technology platform that presents a new way for service providers to better understand traffic and differentiate their offerings.
Q. How can service providers benefit from LiveAction’s new business unit and the LiveSP platform?
A. They can do this in a few ways. First, using technology and tools that simplify the management of increasingly complex networks by providing greater visibility, insight, and advanced reporting on network and application performance – especially in an evolving, software-defined technology landscape.
Also, as a cloud-first, multi-tenant and highly scalable network performance monitoring platform specifically designed and developed for service providers, LiveSP features customized reports on network KPIs, supports network service orchestration and provides greater visibility and SD-WAN monitoring for IWAN, Viptela, Nuage, and other popular solutions.
Third, LiveSP enables service providers to unify network management to create and deliver more innovative services with a tool that’s simple to use yet is built on a powerful platform.
Q. How does this acquisition impact the future of LiveAction?
A. With complementary business goals and technology platforms, LiveAction’s acquisition of LivingObjects technology gives us a deeper reach throughout Europe and the service provider market. Not to mention the power of our expert group of software developers who have decades upon decades of proven experience working with service providers.
We’re excited for what 2018 holds as we join the LiveAction family!
