Posted 10/2000
E-Markets and Services
MANTRA Brings Determinism to Service Delivery
By Paula Bernier
Having completed at least the initial phase of their broadband buildouts, most network service providers are now looking to move up the value chain to offer more than straight transport, which is increasingly considered a commodity. Carriers now want to offer more specialized connections, such as transport that offers certain service level guarantees and connectivity on an on-demand basis. Offering content on demand--be it entertainment programming such as movies or games, or network-based applications software--over public networks is another way service providers of all stripes are adding value to the product mix.
Of course, the idea behind adding higher-level services to the network is to control churn, particularly of high margin customers, and drive new revenues. It's a business issue, not a technology one. Yet most of the tools used today to support these new services tend to focus on simple allocation of bandwidth or rerouting, for example, while overlooking the business case behind the service. But that's starting to change.
A new company called Mantra (www.mantranet.com) now sells what it calls the Intelligent Resource Exchange, or IRX. IRX was designed to help content providers, network application providers and broadband access service providers maximize the profit-generating potential of their services.
The product applies a cost metric to each network resource in the fulfillment supply chain, similar to the cost of goods model in the manufacturing sector. The matrix is based on user demand and the available supply of resources. Services are then delivered according to the user demand, resource supply and--the new twist--the provider's business rules. It imposes business decisions onto the provider's infrastructure in real time to enable the carrier to deliver those services bearing the highest revenue potential.
Picus Communications (www.picus.com ) is the first announced customer of the IRX. The integrated communications provider is using the tool for activation of voice enhanced services and advanced data services.
Neil Snyder, executive vice president of marketing and business development at Mantra, describes IRX as a "yield management system" that enables service providers to be more deterministic in allocating their resources. "If you think about factory floor automatic warehouse provisioning, you need to know manufacturing costs and what you can sell the [product] for," says Snyder. "That's determinism."
IRX first models the service provider's infrastructure. It assigns cost against resources, such as a DS-3 or a fiber connection, figuring in whether the carrier leases or owns and those related costs. The system sees requests for services, and it can assign resources to those requests as needed. IRX can also reassign resources to make sure higher priority services get what they need.
"Today, to meet SLAs, carriers burst to catch up. How much does that cost? Carriers don't know," says Snyder. "We let them know."
Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. (www.cimicorp.com), a consulting company that has done some work for Mantra, says there are policy management systems on the market today, but they normally manage only technical issues, like under what conditions a carrier can do alternate routing. "What [Mantra has] done is quantify business metrics and make the network be able to apply policy rules to this broader set of metrics," he says. For example, while some tools have the ability to do alternate routing of premium service customers, says Nolle, those systems can't help a carrier define a given customer's value. Mantra's IRX, meanwhile, can base decisions not simply on whether a customer is signed up for a particular premium service, but whether the customer is a premium customer, explains Nolle, noting that a top customer may not be on a premium service in every case.
"Mantra also has another wrinkle on this that's a little bit different," Nolle adds. He refers to it as a "wafer strategy," meaning Mantra's software "wafers" fit between various operation support system software components to allow this business policy management system to work with the carrier's existing OSSs. And Mantra is working to partner with vendors that offer billing and customer care, provisioning, network management and other OSS software to ensure interoperability.
Nolle says IRX is an entirely new class of product. "I think you're probably going to see a lot more of this concept," he says, adding that Mantra needs to figure out how to stay ahead of the curve as the big boys such as Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) and Nortel Networks Corp. (www.nortelnetworks.com) recognize the need for this new product type.
