A new report from New Relic found that 57% of telcos and 27% of technology companies have outages characterized as high-business impact once or more per week. The report said these outages cost telcos an average of $2 million per hour and technology companies $1.6 million per hour. More than 500 relevant people or departments were surveyed.
New Relic, which self-describes as an “intelligent observability” provider, said its recent research — “State of Observability for Telecommunications and Technology” — reveals a link between telecommunications and technology companies using observability to monitor AI systems and strong return on investment (ROI).
So far, observability is being adopted by 74% of telcos and 52% of technology companies. The average of all industries is 54%, though the expectation is that the portion will rise to 94% during the next three years.
The results are promising: 58% of telco and 49% of technology companies reported an ROI of 2x to 3x or more–with 10% of telcos reporting ROI of between 5x and 10x. Half of all respondents report that observability helps them achieve key performance indicators, which is well above the industry average of 36%.
“This data is powerful because it shows more than one path to observability maturity. For telcos, they face extreme pressure from high outage costs and are successfully leapfrogging traditional monitoring to go AI-first, while IT organizations are leveraging their strengths by building a developer-centric foundation,” New Relic Chief Technology Strategist Nic Benders said in a press release about the outages and observability report.
“For both industries, observability is no longer just a technical tool; it is a key strategy driving business performance as well as operational stability across both the telecommunications and technology industries.”
The report also highlighted other benefits. Operational efficiency, at 43%, is the most cited benefit by technology organizations. It is followed by improved uptime and reliability (40%). Telcos cited uptime (38%) and improved developer productivity (32%) as the top two benefits.
Outage prevention is not just for big service providers. In February, GOCare said that Ellijay Telephone Company (ETC) was launching its GOCare OutageIQ for networking monitoring and subscriber communications for unplanned outages and routine maintenance. ETC’s service area includes Ellijay, Jasper, Blue Ridge, Ball Ground, and Talking Rock in northern Georgia.
