Posted: 10/15/1999
Separation Anxiety
Carriers Differentiate Service Management from Network Elements
By Peter Lambert and Charlotte Wolter
Old operations support systems (OSSs) were built on the assumption that each service was tied to a specific set of network devices, or elements. "The model was managing service features by managing network elements," Nolle says. "Now the service and the infrastructure are not the same thing."
This paradigm shift opens an opportunity for carriers to create service-based, rather than network element-based, OSSs and a clean slate to create unified back-office processes.
"The whole secret to avoiding OSS silos lies with developing data warehouses with common indexing and cross-referencing, then creating objects that are reusable across systems," according to Mike Vent, president of network services and chief technology officer of IXC Communications Inc., Austin, Texas. Object-based software, most industry insiders agree, provides the greatest hope for an affordable back office with maximum longevity.
With object-oriented software, an object might represent a network device, a customer, a relationship between people or machines or even a process, such as provisioning a port on a switch. Objects can be created, changed or combined without altering the common foundation, which is a much more flexible process than compiling fixed software code for each customer, machine or process.
Central to object technology is the common object request broker architecture (CORBA), introduced in 1991 by the Object Management Group (OMG). CORBA provides a means of communication between applications regardless of their physical location on a network or design, and allows users to gain access to information transparently.
Before objects, the only way to create OSSs was to hard-code them into a specific type of hardware or into a specific, fixed business process or procedure, such as order entry, says John Borden, president and CEO for Granite Systems Inc., Manchester, N.H. Data might reside in a data warehouse while procedures reside in separate, management system software.
Now, with objects, software can combine data with procedure, "just as human DNA provides not only data on eye color or height, but also a set of step-by-step instructions on how to build that human," Borden says. "Instead of building a hard-coded, fixed procedure that is very difficult to change, you can change process behavior in run time, rather than hard-code compile time, so procedure becomes as malleable as data."
Some of the leading telecommunications vendors, among them Fujitsu Network Transmission Systems Inc., Richardson, Texas; Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J.; Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas; Siemens Information and Communication Networks, Boca Raton, Fla.; Telcordia Technologies, Morristown, N.J.; and Tellabs Inc., Lisle, Ill., have already decided that objects will be the management glue among their optical systems.
In June they agreed to an object-oriented software interface that will allow end-to-end management of multivendor synchronous optical network (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) networks. The interface will simplify the management of the heterogeneous, multivendor networks that have become common as large global carriers have formed. It would also aid the use of best-of-class products from multiple vendors in building a single network.
The group's CORBA-based interface would work between network management systems (NMS) and element management systems (EMS). It would allow service providers to provision networks, activate services, collect fault information and manage the network from a single management platform. The group also plans to extend the interfaces to the hybrid fiber/coaxial (HFC) networks used by cable companies.
Through its partnership with New York-based Thor Technologies Inc., Granite has begun to apply the object model to OSS integration. While Granite's Xpercom element management system manages design, planning, assignment, inventory and provisioning of network devices such as a switch or router, Thor's CarrierBase OSS encompasses order entry, order management, provisioning, scheduling, tracking, reporting, trending and automated electronic commerce.
Typically, such systems reside in separate data silos. However, "our integration with Thor reconciles the order process with the process of provisioning circuits," says Borden.
Through CORBA technology, a Thor software object representing, for example, a customer frame relay service order, could automatically request that a Granite object execute the provisioning of a frame relay switch port for that customer.
"For an object that wants to share or request something of another object, CORBA handles the object transport and execution," Borden says. "So applications can share their specialties to create whole solutions."
Among others using CORBA are Osicom Technologies Inc., Santa Monica, Calif., with its metro dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) systems; ObjectSwitch Corp., San Francisco, in its ObjectSwitch 3 integration server software product family; and Nightfire Software Inc., Berkeley, Calif., in its order automation software.
Such malleability and automation will be critical to managing operations at a global scale, says James Olsen, vice president of marketing for Objective Systems Integrator Inc. (OSI), Folsom, Calif. "Our 250 carrier customers are merging so that the networks we're managing are suddenly two to three times larger, and they are heterogeneous wireless and wireline."
To provide a middleware operating system for network management, upon which operations applications can be built, OSI in May introduced Virtual Process Management (VPM), a modular, object-based software system riding on OSI's Unified Management Architecture. VPM turns time-tested operational rule sets into objects that are reusable across wireless, wireline, circuit-switched and packet-switched networks.
One key advantage of using objects is they can make network complexities transparent to network operators. For example, an object model might include (1) if there is an alarm, (2) what customers are affected by the outage, (3) which customers have a service level agreement, and (4) what rerouting of service should occur. The more detailed information about specific links, devices and ports comes into OSI's NetExpert system "and is normalized at a level higher than code, in terms of rule sets that are common and repeatable across different networks," Olsen says.
CIMI is advising carriers and manufacturers to develop new OSSs based on a "service object model. We call it object-enabled networking, because certain service management and service provisioning processes don't fit into the directory-enabled network architecture," Nolle says.
In the new model, "when a service is created, all the network elements needed to deliver that service are object-brokered to launch the service, but also the service is object-brokered to the management and provisioning systems, so your craft people can manage the new service for the long haul."
Whether merged, acquired, partnered or apart, Nolle says, multiservice carriers face a revolutionary disruption in their back-office foundations.
