How To Think About Managed Connectivity Partner Portals

Managed connectivity offers a lot of advantages to organizations of all sizes. You get the network infrastructure your business needs, but without having to deal with all the configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, and vendor management. This saves your team a lot of time and headaches—and you don’t need to hire all that expertise, which is expensive and can be hard to find.

One trade-off is that you lose some visibility into and control over the portion of your infrastructure that your partner is managing for you. That’s why most managed connectivity suppliers offer portals—to provide information and self-service capabilities. These portals enable you to accomplish a variety of useful tasks, such as:

Remotely manage devices
Enroll new devices
Acquire add-on services without having to talk to anyone
Manage configurations and policies
View and pay bills
View order and project status
Get dashboard views of alerts, insights, and trends

Portals are great sales tools…

When you’re in the market for managed connectivity services and are evaluating potential partners, there’s nothing to really see. The only thing a provider can effectively demo is their portal, so that often becomes the centerpiece of the sales process. It serves as a proxy for the service itself, which is effectively invisible, and companies have become conditioned to expect flashy portals with lots of bells and whistles.

…But are portals great management tools?

The answer is: It depends.

For many organizations, the partner-provided portal is a terrific tool for accessing information and useful self-service functionality. Getting the (usually smaller) team to incorporate the portal into their (usually more limited) toolbox is relatively easy and it boosts their ability to do their jobs well.

But consider the case of a large enterprise with multiple managed connectivity partners across the globe, as well as dozens of other suppliers throughout their broader technology ecosystem. This organization likely has an IT service management (ITSM) system, like ServiceNow or AutoTask, to streamline processes, automate tasks, and manage incidents more effectively. The ITSM is the platform their teams work in every day, so asking them to hop out of the system to access a vendor-specific portal forces them into “swivel chair management” which is inefficient, time-consuming, and frustrating. Now multiply that by the total number of portal-providing suppliers, and they’re having to juggle dozens, if not hundreds, of third-party portals on top of the ITSM. Furthermore, a third-party portal can’t enforce the organization’s approval workflows—they would instead have to be managed manually which can create operational risk. And for companies that, for regulatory or audit purposes, are required to keep their data within one system of record or single source of truth, a separate portal can create compliance risk.

This is why many enterprises don’t actually use their partners’ managed connectivity portals—no matter how well-designed and feature-rich they are.

So, what’s the alternative?

Portals provide something tangible to focus on, but ultimately what’s most important is getting information about your managed connectivity services and access to relevant self-service features in a way that maximizes your team’s effectiveness and efficiency. The portal itself is simply one delivery mechanism, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. For enterprises that have their own ITSM in place, a better option is to integrate with that system. So, whatever they need to do—whether that’s opening a ticket when a circuit goes down, logging a configuration change request, seeing how a circuit is performing, or something else—it can be done within their standard workflows in their primary system.

There are several ways that portal functionality can be integrated. A simple approach is email parsing, a process that uses email as the delivery mechanism and then automatically extracts specific data from the email to ingest into the ITSM. A more sophisticated approach is to use APIs for bi-directional communications. This option requires some development work, but may be worth the effort for some enterprises, particularly those with large managed connectivity engagements.

Which option is right for you?

Portals are ideal for organizations that:

Only have a small handful of tools for monitoring and management
Have relatively simple workflows and approval processes
Don’t mind “swivel chair” management

The integration approach is better suited for enterprises that:

Have an ITSM with workflows, escalation paths, and approval processes built in
Require data to live in one system of record for compliance and/or audit purposes

BCM One delivers Managed Connectivity information and features your way

Portals aren’t inherently bad—or inherently good, for that matter. They are simply one delivery mechanism for the information and self-service features you want from your managed connectivity partner. At BCM One, we always start with our clients’ business needs and design a requirements-driven (not technology-driven) solution—and that philosophy applies to our portal approach as well. You want a great portal to understand and manage aspects of your service? We’ve got that. But if you need our service to fit into your existing systems, we can do that, too.

Jessica Seabrook – Marketing Director

Jessica is an experienced marketing leader focused on driving brand impact through innovative live events and digital campaigns. With a track record of delivering results, she brings strategic insight and creative execution to every initiative, helping brands connect meaningfully with their audiences.