REDUCING INTEGRATION COST

System integration is the bane of many a service provider's existence. Adding just one new box, such as a router or switch, to the network is likely to cost a service provider in the neighborhood of $10 million in integration costs to tie the equipment with the carrier's existing operations support systems (OSS).

"Integration in the end is still the problem," said Enrico Bagnasco, head of network management at Telecom Italia, during the October TeleManagement World conference in Las Vegas. "The new piece of the story is we now have neither the time nor the money for the long integration process."

Despite efforts to ease the pain, integration of different operations support systems and between network elements and OSSs remains a formidable financial and time-to-market hurdle for service providers.

Industry groups and vendors have undertaken initiatives to chip away at the problem. So far, those efforts have had only limited impact because different vendors take variety of approaches to OSS and the uniqueness of each service provider's OSS structure. Each service provider has a particular group of services and, usually, a mix of old and new support systems behind those services.

Still, work continues in the effort to crack -- or at least soften -- the OSS integration nut.

One of the more high-profile efforts is the TeleManagement Forum's New Generation OSS initiative, a.k.a. NGOSS, a "technology neutral" architecture that can work with a variety of technologies such as Corba, Jini, Java, J2EE and XML.

The goal of NGOSS is to make integration easier and less expensive for service providers that want add and change services, software and equipment in their networks. NGOSS promises to enable service providers and their suppliers to make the required adjustments to back office systems within a few months or several weeks -- rather than nine or more months -- and at a lower cost, says Martin Creaner, vice president of technical programs at TMF.

Today, different OSSs for functions such as billing, customer care, network management, provisioning and other applications are interconnected in a meshed architecture, meaning each individual OSS needs a direct connection to every other system, explains Creaner. NGOSS aims to instead move to a bus architecture, in which the various OSS software applications could link into a common piece of middleware from a company such as BEA Systems Inc., TIBCO Software Inc. or Vitria Technology Inc., he says.

NGOSS seems to have significant support in the vendor community, as there have been a number of NGOSS "Catalyst" demonstrations staged among different OSS vendors at the recent TeleManagement World and other TMF events.

"Catalyst gives customers an idea of what to ask for in [requests for information]," says Michael Bender, chief operating officer of Sodalia North America.

NGOSS also is good for the industry because it gets different companies together to solve problems, says Curtis Begley, Orchestream's president of North American operations. "But do you ever reach this nirvana where everyone is integrated?" Begley's comment reveals there is a fair amount of skepticism surrounding NGOSS and how far it will get the industry in easing integration.

"NGOSS needs to get away from theory," says Cramer Systems Europe Ltd.'s president Kimber Lewis. She says a key issue with NGOSS is lack of a standard implementation for the bus. This means OSS application software suppliers would have to adjust their products to work with a variety of bus implementations from the various middleware suppliers.

So far, there have been no commercial implementations of NGOSS, which has been in the works for more than a year. Telecom Italia's Bagnasco says the company recently wrapped up a request for proposals and didn't receive a single NGOSS proposal.

The industry seems to agree NGOSS is suffering the chicken and egg problem. Vendors of OSSs and network elements don't want to implement NGOSS until service providers ask for it and vice versa.

The recently launched NGOSS Compliance Program could address that situation. The program will define what compliance means, create tests for compliance and license test houses around the world to carry out tests.

By May 2002, TMF expects to have done its first compliance tests with a group of vendors.