Zain Kuwait taps Accedian, Cisco for ‘unparalleled’ network performance monitoring and analytics

Digital service provider Zain Kuwait has invested in technology from performance analytics and end-user experience solutions provider Accedian and Cisco to automate its network with increased network visibility and service assurance.

Zain Kuwait was founded in Kuwait in 1983 as the first mobile telecommunications company in the Middle East and Africa. It became the first telecom operator to launch a commercial GSM service in the region in 1994, and was the first telecom company in Kuwait to launch nationwide 4G LTE internet services in 2012.

In May 2019, Zain Kuwait announced its network was fully ready for the commercial launch of 5G wireless technology, and was the first operator to offer 5G technology in the GCC region via the Kuwaiti market, with nationwide coverage of all areas in June 2019.

Zain’s partnership with the technology firms is designed to enhance visibility and insight into its network. With the integration of Accedian Skylight into Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation platform, the two firms say Zain will gain a single view of its network and service performance at a per-customer granularity to help meet its business-to-business (B2B) customers’ needs. 

“Our goal has been to further strengthen our leadership position in the market as the first destination for digital business solutions,” said Zain Kuwait CTO Nawaf Al-Gharabally. “To do so, we were keen on leveraging our rich partnership ecosystem to proactively act on quality of experience issues and introduce more automation into our daily operations that will drastically enhance our B2B customer experience and provisioning.

“That requires full visibility and deep, granular insight into the full reality of what is happening in our networks. Since our B2B customers also require this type of granular visibility, we have collaborated with Cisco and Accedian to meet this need for our business customers by offering them this service through a customer portal.”

The strategic relationship has also been constructed to provide Zain Kuwait with what the tech firms describe as “unparalleled” visibility into its own network, with reporting and analytics available in flexible dashboards to enable insight from the microsecond-level to the holistic network view, giving Zain Kuwait end-to-end network, application and service performance visibility, data granularity, and the ability to detect performance issues better.

Service assurance will be deployed on an “as a service” basis, with Zain Kuwait now providing customer-specific dashboards. Improved automation tools will also streamline everyday network tasks and functions to keep repetitive processes controlled and managed automatically as network service availability improves, without impacting the customer experience.