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Righting Old Wrongs

November 1, 2001 By Paula Bernier Comments

Posted in Articles

Inaccurate data are causing trouble within service providers. But some startups are coming to market to right these operational inefficiencies, which they say are costing network operators thousands to millions of dollars per year.

Information within different parts of service providers' operations and business support systems often doesn't jibe, according to Longitude Systems Inc., an OSS-related company. So Longitude is offering systems integration and software tools to find discrepancies in service providers' billing and provisioning systems, equipment inventory and services data.

Incorrect information abounds within services providers' systems, explains Joel Halpern, Longitude's co-founder and CTO. It can range from having an incorrect address for a specific customer in a database; to having a T3 service listed as a T1 connection; to having a Juniper Networks Inc. router inventoried as a Cisco Systems Inc. device, he says. As a result of such problems, service providers commonly end up buying more equipment, losing customers, authorizing unnecessary truck rolls and lengthening time to market of new services, he adds.

Longitude addresses those data incongruities with its Abeo technology, which allows the company to build models of customers, networks and services in what Halpern describes as an "evolvable model." This model, based on the concept that change is the only constant, checks for system incongruities system.

"We use data mapping and reconciliation and create objects in the model and compare that with objects in the systems," he says. "This happens on an ongoing basis. When we bring in the first information, we detect what's wrong and help the service provider fix it."

For example, the billing system might report that a customer at a given location has a T1 connection, whereas the provisioning system might think that customer has a T3, Halpern says.

Abeo also can synch up network inventory records, notes Dan Leary, vice president of product management and marketing. An example of a potential problem in network inventory could be created when a service provider adds a router from Juniper, for example, to its network that's already heavily populated with Cisco routers. It's difficult to upgrade all the support systems quickly, says Leary, so some service providers simply register the Juniper routers as Cisco routers in their databases. But down the line that service provider might want to implement MPLS only on its Juniper routers, get a software upgrade or do other maintenance to the Juniper routers only, adds Halpern. Then it's difficult to find those network elements without a human resources-intensive hunt for those routers.

The Abeo software, which can work with any OSS or BSS system, includes various clients for various functions, Including a tool for identifying models; a rules manager to define rules for what's correct; data reconciliation, which defines data mapping scripts; a reporting system, which extracts data into Oracle Corp. databases so service providers can run their own reports; a tool to enable service providers to make manual changes; and support for a remote method invocation (RMI) interface so other applications can find and change objects. That bundle of software starts at $500,000. Systems integration to get the product going costs about as much as the product itself, says Halpern.

The product was built with business-oriented backbone IP service providers in mind, but it can be it used by virtually any type of service provider.

Data reconciliation tools also are offered by Kabira Technologies Inc. The company offers server software initially intended for provisioning for broadband, optical and wireless networks.

Short message service is a data mediation application Kabira technology addresses. Grover Righter, Kabira's vice president of technical strategy, explains that short message service switches generate packets that aren't in standard call detail record (CDR) format, but the Kabira technology would convert that information, throw it out or do whatever is needed.

Kabira also does mediation for its customer NOOS, a cable operator that provides Internet access, television and telephone services to more than 2 million homes in France. The company offers special pay-per-view events, focusing heavily on sports. As customers go live, a record is initiated and that information is captured so customers can be billed for that. There is mediation because services on demand don't have a standard, Righter says.

Unlike the old mediation model, in which customers waited for big new switch tables to be released annually, Kabira has the flexibility to model new data types so customers can address new mediation needs as they arise.

Abeo in the OSS Environment
Longitude Systems Inc. (www.longsys.com)