An interview with Broadpeak’s Director of Managed Services and Infrastructure.
At Broadpeak, we have developed our Cockpit, at the heart of our Managed Services offering, not only to provide a high-performance network, enhance cybersecurity, and fastly handle and always resolve incidents but also to constantly improve the network . The entire client ecosystem is included in Broadpeak’s Cockpit, not just Broadpeak’s products. That is, we take care of the customer’s technological platform’s network, storage, and several other components, as well as everything related to the streaming solutions. Augustin Vaucelle, who has a strong experience as a Project Manager, has been part of Broadpeak team since 2017 and is now Director of Managed Services and Infrastructure at Broadpeak and is leading the Cockpit. We interviewed Augustin to learn more about how it works and what it means for our customers.
What is the Cockpit? What’s the difference between a Cockpit, a Network Operations Center (NOC), and a Security Operations Center (SOC)?
A NOC, as named, is network-oriented. So it is a place where people monitor and support a defined network 24/7. A SOC, is security-oriented. Here again, it is a place where people monitor and ensure the security of a defined ecosystem 24/7.
Because both ideas are crucial to our consumers, we at Broadpeak came up with the Cockpit idea. A NOC and a SOC were combined to create the Broadpeak Cockpit. By doing so, we look after the customer ecosystem in its globality, including its technical and security aspects. We have set up 3 cockpits: Singapore, Rennes, and Denver to provide 24/7 availability in a follow-the-sun model.
What does a cockpit team do? What about a Cockpit engineer?
Our 24/7 team is in charge of monitoring, supporting (level 1 support), and even operating the technical platform of our customers.
A cockpit engineer is a key person within our Managed Services offer. Indeed, they are the first line of support for our customers. They are accountable for the quality of service (QoS) we owe to our customers but not only. They are also in charge of coordinating with a third party to solve incidents or operate the technical platform.
As our managed services offer include RUN activities, the cockpit engineers can operate the customer systems or take part in the run activities with Broadpeak’s operations engineer.
The cockpit engineers is also working with the Broadpeak team to define the best AI algorithm to provide relevant technical and business reports to our customers.
Inside Broadpeak’s cockpit
What happens within the Cockpit?
Within 1 day inside the Cockpit, you will see several engineers occupied with several tasks, among them:
- Monitoring our customers’ dashboards
- Taking calls from our customers for many reasons: incidents, technical questions, change requests…
- Coordinating operations with the customer and third parties
- Making level 1 support investigation
- Escalating incident to level 2 support and providing relevant technical information (context, log..)
- Making reports: post-mortem reports, quality reports, business reports…
- Making changes to the customer system (RUN activities)
- Onboarding a new customer
Our cockpit engineers also regularly attend internal training sessions to stay up-to-date on Broadpeak solutions.
What are the essential elements of building and setting up a Cockpit?
The Cockpit is composed of 4 essential components, rather like a cuisine recipe:
- People: You can have everything… building, Airco, tools… even coffee machine, but without people, you do nothing! People are key! And those people must be skilled: hard skills of course but not only. Soft skills are also very important for a good collaboration within the team and to help our customers solve problems within stressful moments.
- Tools: The Cockpit team must have performant tools to monitor and operate. Here at Broadpeak we use tools available in the market but not only. We also have defined our own monitoring architecture based on open-source elements and homemade products : BKA200 and BKA100… hosted in the AWS cloud to ensure high availability and elasticity.
- Security: You must take care of the security of your customer, in 2 aspects: cyber security and data security (GDPR). For that reason, we have mixed the skills of our engineers within the cockpit team by including several cyber security engineers. Mixing the competencies is a key element of success and a good way for all the cockpit engineers to grow and get additional skills.
- Training: You must give your team the tools to make their duties. Training is an important element as the cockpit team must be fully “equipped” to ensure a high quality of service to our customers.
What are the challenges that telecom network operations can face?
The biggest challenge I see today is being able to sustain the peak of content consumption while keeping a high video quality. The Cockpit is here to support and anticipate this situation and is supported by the Broadpeaks technologies like the multicast ABR and other upcoming innovations in this trend!
Why Cockpit is such a differential for Broadpeak?
Our Cockpit is unique as it embraces the customer ecosystem, not only the Broadpeak products. This means that we will take care of the network, storage, and several other elements part of the customer technical platform and linked to the streaming solutions.
