One New Zealand adopts Highlight to boost service visibility

One New Zealand has selected the Highlight Service Observability Platform for its managed network services, aiming to give business and public sector customers clearer visibility of performance and service levels.

The move affects a managed service operation serving hundreds of organisations, from small businesses to government departments. Customers will be able to see network performance, service levels, and overall service value more clearly.

Managed network providers are facing rising expectations for more transparent reporting on service delivery. At the same time, network estates have become more complex, with more remote sites, more devices, and more suppliers involved in day-to-day operations.

Highlight's platform focuses on service observability, aggregating network and service data into dashboards and reports for service teams and business stakeholders. One New Zealand plans to use it across its service desk and service delivery management functions.

Service visibility

A key element of the deployment is multi-tenancy, which lets a service provider manage separate customer environments within a single platform. This will give One New Zealand's service desk a central view across managed customers while keeping each customer's data separated.

Some customers will be able to access dashboards directly. Others will continue to rely on monthly reporting from service delivery managers. This reflects a common split in managed services: larger, more digitally mature customers often want self-service views, while others prefer summary reporting and regular service reviews.

The platform is also expected to change how One New Zealand produces service reports. The business currently relies on manual reporting where data is dispersed across tools and suppliers. Highlight includes scheduled reporting, which should reduce the time spent preparing monthly packs and service-level reports.

One New Zealand also highlighted reporting for service level agreements on broadband connections linked to Cisco Meraki environments. Meraki is widely used for managed networks in retail and other branch-based organisations with many sites and standardised deployments.

Commercial angle

Beyond operational reporting, One New Zealand expects to use the platform's analytics for capacity planning and account management. Trend and performance data is intended to support more data-led conversations with customers as network demand grows.

In managed services, identifying capacity constraints early can reduce service incidents and improve user experience. It can also shape purchasing decisions when additional bandwidth, upgraded hardware, or network design changes are needed as sites expand and device counts rise.

One New Zealand also expects the platform to support its partner standing with Cisco. It aims to maintain Cisco Preferred Partner status under the Cisco 360 partner ecosystem, which requires measurable service performance and customer outcomes.

Implementation

One New Zealand described the deployment as straightforward, with initial work focused on integration and ingesting data into dashboards. The proof of concept required API integration, after which data populated automatically with minimal configuration.

Mark Poulton, Senior Product & Propositions Manager, Digital Infrastructure at One NZ, said the platform would change customer support and reporting.

"With Highlight, we can now automate how we support customers, reduce manual effort and provide clearer insights. The platform revitalises our managed services portfolio, differentiates our services and will play a central role in delivering measurable, data-driven service excellence to our customers. Ultimately, by adding greater value, Highlight helps reduce the risk of customers moving to another supplier."

One New Zealand gave an example from a retail network refresh, in which it worked with a national retail customer on a Cisco Meraki refresh across around 50 stores.

"For one of our national retail customers who was undertaking a Cisco Meraki network refresh across around 50 stores, Highlight quickly identified over 300 devices overloading a single Wi-Fi access point. Before Highlight, this issue would have been difficult to find without a great deal of investigation," Poulton said.

One New Zealand expects the technology to support accountability and transparency in managed service relationships, with customers choosing between direct dashboard access and structured monthly reporting as the service rolls out across its customer base.