Posted: 07/15/1999
Putting Together Pieces of OSS
Partnerships Push Integrated Solutions
By Ken Branson
At SUPERCOMM '99 in Atlanta, talking to vendors of operations support systems (OSSs) and billing and customer care systems was like playing Jeopardy. You start with the answers--called "solutions" and sometimes "solution sets"--and work your way backward to the questions.
The answers came from alliances, integrators and niche players.
Alliances
The World Congress Center had more alliances than the Congress of Vienna. Here are a few.
MetaSolv Software Inc., Plano, Texas, brought all its alliance partners together in its booth at SUPERCOMM to demonstrate that their systems all could work together and run a network. Among those in the booth were Harris Corp., Melbourne, Fla.; Harmony-Com, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Saville Systems plc, Burlington, Mass.
They were interoperating with MetaSolv's flagship pro-duct, the Telecom Business Solutions (TBS) suite of OSSs. TBS long has been an off-the-shelf choice for competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) in the market for their first full set of back-office systems.
"Alliances enable vendors to work out the details of integration before their solutions are implemented into a service provider's infrastructure," says Dana Brown, vice president of marketing at MetaSolv, minimizing the risk of integration while leveraging best-of-breed domain knowledge."
HarmonyCom joined MetaSolv in a partnership on May 3, and brought to SUPERCOMM its broadband provisioning system, Harmony. HarmonyCom's president, Curtis Begley, says Harmony is focused on new carriers with few legacy systems. The system is truly new; the company hasn't announced any customers yet. Beta customers were due for shipments this month.
"[Harmony] does full provisioning of services," Begley says. "For
example, it can take orders from a MetaSolv system and then do the network design,
planning, allocate the resources for the service and set up the verification. It does
service-impact analysis to show the problem, which customers are affected and how to fix
it so the highest-
priority customers are taken care of first. We provide an end-to-end model of the network,
so it can do any kind of mapping for the carrier or its customers."
The price begins at about $400,000 and goes up to about $2 million, depending on the configuration.
Saville, a long-time MetaSolv ally, brought its billing and customer care systems to the show. The business of figuring out what a customer owes, sending an accurate bill to that customer and getting paid is a big enough pond for Saville to swim in, according to Richard P. Aroian, vice president-marketing.
Saville's flagship product is SavilleCBP (convergent billing platform), to which it has added SavilleCare--"an enterprise, system-independent" customer care system, and Saville IBP, a carrier-to-carrier billing system.
Harris announced its alliance with MetaSolv at the show, and also demonstrated its Harris Network Management (HNM) platform. Harris' pitch is that HNM will automate enough of the network management function to allow a new carrier to forego the hiring of a large operations staff as it grows.
"We know that service providers want an end-to-end solution, and Harris' alliance with MetaSolv will help deliver it," says Jim Odom, vice president for network management in Harris' Communications Products Division.
That assertion was the stated rationale for the purchase of Kenan Systems Corp., Cambridge, Mass., by Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J. Lucent makes back-office systems; Kenan makes billing and customer care systems.
Certainly, MetaSolv and most other alliance makers agree in principle, if not in detail.
Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Palo Alto, Calif., and KPMG LLP, New York, announced an alliance of their own at the show. The three companies aim to combine hardware from Cisco and HP, mix it with the expertise of all three, and add leading applications software from third-party vendors to complete the integrated, end-to-end OSS and business support systems (BSS) offerings. They expect to develop and demonstrate these solutions in "Alliance Resource Centers" located around the world, the first of which is scheduled to open in Mountain View, Calif., this fall.
But the view that customers want end-to-end OSSs is not universal.
Joe Moosa, executive vice president of Eftia OSS Solutions Inc., Ottawa, concedes that customers may want end-to-end solutions, and may even want them from one vendor. But wanting and having are not the same things.
"You can only give a damn [about buying from a single source] if you have a choice," Moosa says. "And the reality is that total inflow from one source is three or four years away."
In the meantime, Moosa and his colleagues are content to do what they do, which is make integrated order management systems.
"Our goal is to be able to handle any kind of telecom order on any kind of infrastructure, and be able to associate customers and services if you lose your infrastructure," Moosa says.
Eftia's flagship is the Master.Scribe suite, which includes a service-order system (a.Scribe), a number-tracking system (n.Scribe), the d.Scribe inventory management system and the pre.Scribe maintenance system.
Eftia also makes an OSS interconnection system, Trans.Scribe, which it demonstrated at SUPERCOMM. The price for the Master.Scribe suite starts at about $2 million, Moosa says. Eftia's new alliance is with Daleen Technologies Inc., Boca Raton, Fla.
Daleen, the flagship product of which is the BillPlex billing and customer care system, is making nonexclusive agreements with producers of back-end systems. Earlier this year, it signed an agreement with Telcordia Technologies Inc., Morristown, N.J., formerly Bellcore. Telcordia makes the JumpStart suite of OSSs aimed at startup carriers. The two companies have signed up two customers so far, Florida Digital Network Inc., Orlando, Fla., and 2nd Century Communications Inc., Tampa, Fla.
Integrators and Consultants
Telcordia also has a professional services organization, and that organization will handle the system integration for the Daleen/2nd Century project.
Joan Labanca, Telcordia's vice president and general manager-new entrant business development, says the full suite of Telcordia's JumpStart OSSs for startup carriers costs about $1.5 million without Daleen's billing systems. With integration work added in, the cost comes to between $2.5 million and $3 million, she says.
Cap Gemini Telecommunications, the merged telecom consulting arm of Beechwood Systems Inc., Clark, N.J., and Cap Gemini America LLC, Morristown, N.J., may not have all the answers, but believes it can find them right quick.
"If your main goal is to get into business as quickly as possible, we can do your business processes, get your OSSs, build your organizational structure and get it done in three or four months," says Jason Donahue, Cap Gemini Telecom's vice president-marketing.
Cap Gemini Telecom, launched officially at the show, immediately announced "seven service offerings aimed squarely at telecommunications carriers' greatest business and information technology (IT) challenges": carrier-to-carrier OSS interconnection, customer care and billing implementation and integration, flow-through implementation, new-entrant systems integration, customer relationship management, post-merger IT consolidation and IP network OSS implementation.
Donahue and his colleagues are reluctant to quote prices for their services. "It depends on time and resources," Donahue says.
Niche Players
BEA Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., claims to be the mortar that holds OSSs together.
"We did a study once to find out what would happen if BEA disappeared," says Chris King, director-telecom markets. "Ninety percent of the wireless bills would not be issued. Eighty percent of the cable TV service orders wouldn't happen. And the other disaster ... 30 percent of the wireline service orders would not be activated. I thought it was kind of a fun study."
BEA's bread and butter is Tuxedo, its main middleware system. King says Tuxedo makes it possible for all the other systems in a telecom network to talk to each other. He also says BEA occupies 90 percent of the market.
Tuxedo handles load balancing, sequence tracking, makes scaling possible and assures reliability, King says. It's used by 220 carriers, including several regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) and AT&T Corp., but also in such new carriers as Covad Communications Co., Santa Clara, Calif. The product has a long history of being integrated in the core of other vendors' software, so many of the carriers using it may not know they are. Tuxedo's base price is $495 per user, King says.
BEA demonstrated two new systems at SUPERCOMM. Web Logic "hosts web-oriented applications," according to King. King says the system is used in Covad's front-end order-entry system. The base price is about $18,000.
Finally, BEA offers E-LINK, an application integration system announced in February and aimed specifically at CLECs. The base price for E-LINK, King says, is about $100,000.
Applied Innovation Inc., Dublin, Ohio, makes network management systems (NMSs). It has three combination hardware/software products: AISwitch, for larger carriers, begins at $20,000; AIM (Applied Innovation Mediator), for smaller carriers, goes for about $6,000; and AISpy, which CEO Gerry Moersdorff refers to affectionately as "the pizza box," aimed at small or startup carriers, goes for $3,000. All these devices help carriers do basic stuff, Moersdorff says. "You put the network element in, provision it, and you know when and where it's failed," he says.
Equally happy in the NMS niche is Lumos Technologies Inc., Santa Monica, Calif. Just three years old, Lumos has marketed its back-office NMS, TMS (Telecom Management Server), and its front-office element management suite, EMS, to software vendors. At SUPERCOMM, it announced it would market these wares directly to carriers. On either end, Lumos' products are intended to make pieces of hardware and software systems talk to each other. Conor Dowling, the CEO, says pricing is a bit of a dark art at the moment, but that the base for the systems is about $75,000, with an ongoing fee of less than 1 percent of revenue. Dowling and his colleagues are not interested in becoming end-to-end vendors.
"We're not going to build billing, order-entry or inventory systems, because there are already some quite good ones out there, so it would be wasteful," Dowling says. "We're going to partner with front-end providers."
Atlanta, There's a Problem
Test and Measurement Devices Work Out the Kinks
By Ken Branson
It's one thing to design a network, another to implement it and yet another to make sure it runs as it should. At SUPERCOMM '99, there was no shortage of vendors that, for a price, were ready to help a carrier do just that.
Tekelec, Calabasas, Calif., provides, among other things, test, measurement and diagnostic systems. The company introduced IP Sentinel, which monitors and maintains both Internet protocol (IP) and traditional signaling system 7 (SS7), circuit-switched networks and the i3000. The i3000 completely surrounds the devices being test. The device allows transmission of SS7 signaling over IP networks, monitors that signaling, and generates traffic simulation and load using the IP protocol stack.
Tektronix Inc., Wilsonville, Ore., announced its Q7750 Optical Network Analyzer, targeted at optical transmission design engineers and makers of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment. The Q7750 is designed to offer engineers the optical carrier frequency measurements for optical elements. The base price is $219,000.
In addition, Tektronix announced new capabilities for its synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH)/synchronous optical network (SONET) test set, the ST2400A. The enhancements--collectively called Option 42--make it possible to verify the end-to-end integrity of 2.488 gigabit-per-second (gbps) networks. The base price for Option 42 is $1,950. The ST2400A is available in transceiver, receiver or transmitter configurations and is priced accordingly: a base price of $63,645 for the transceiver, $39,645 for a transmitter-only configuration; and $34,945 for the receiver-only configuration.
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Palo Alto, Calif., announced a three-year agreement with Ando Electric Co., Tokyo, to develop and market high-rate DWDM and SDH/SONET functional test instruments. This collaboration is limited to DWDM and SONET test instruments, which will be marketed by Ando in Japan and by HP elsewhere.
HP also announced its own dedicated DWDM test solution for network equipment makers, the HP Spectral BER 2.5 gigabits per second (gbps). The price is $87,480 for a four-port transmit module, or one four-port receive module in a VXI mainframe. Individual four-port transmit modules cost $73,440 per module.
TTC, Germantown, Md., introduced the TPI 350+ Analyzer, a hand-held, asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL) test instrument supporting carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation, discrete multitone (DMT) and G.Lite line codes. The TPI 350+ retails for $3,500.
TTC, long a maker of test and measurement equipment, also is promoting a new consulting service, which company officials say will help carriers optimize the performance of their networks.
GN Nettest Inc., Hopkinton, Mass., announced a new surveillance system for SS7 networks, Quest7. Don McGillis, vice president-telecom, says Quest7 is aimed at carriers of all sizes.
Fujitsu Network Communications Inc., Richardson, Texas, demonstrated its netRestore service, which amounts to a full-function audit of a carrier's Fujitsu fiber optic systems. The idea is to find problems before they occur, says Ronnie Hutson, director-technical services.
There are three levels of netRestore. The first is "nonintrusive," Hutson says, and includes network testing and assessment, including provisioning, environmental, physical data communications and network performance checks with recommended solutions. The cost is $900 per network element. The next level, for $1,700 per network element, includes all that, plus cable routing and labeling, alarm, cross-connect and fiber checks, a provisioning matrix and network mapping. The third level, for $2,500 per network element, includes everything in the first two levels, plus redundancy testing.
Finally, Minacom, Montreal, announced its first move into the service assurance applications market with quality of service (QoS) and global test management systems, DirectQuality, and DirectTest.
