Naturally, carriers are uncomfortable admitting they haven't kept very good track of things. Now, as service providers are putting the brakes on capital expenditures, they need to make the most of what they have. That new mindset is fueling interest in systems that do asset recovery.
"Asset discovery is a real hot area," says Robert Rosenberg, president of The Insight Research Corp. in Boonton, N.J. "Even in the down market people realize if they put in these new systems they can avoid putting in new equipment, and they can use their assets more effectively."
RHK reported in its July 2002 study "Network Resource Management: Inventory Takes Stage" up to $10 billion in network assets in North America alone could be recovered and reused with network resource management (NRM) technology.
Service providers already are starting to rack up the savings.
Found Assets
For example, Broadwing turned to Ai Metrix's inventory reconciliation product to get a handle on what it had available in the way of DSLAMs, switches and aggregation boxes.
"Their tools gave us the ability to look in a real-time basis to see what assets were in use and what were not," says Dave Torline, CIO at Broadwing Inc. Broadwing also benefited by speeding its time to provision, allowing it to commit to and deliver better SLAs, he says.
"Now we know how the inventory is configured in the network, where it is and what's live. So now we can automate provisioning of those assets," adds Mark Wyman, vice president of marketing and business development at Ai Metrix.
Industrywide there's a 70 to 80 percent failure rate of flow-through DSL ordering, this means a lot of manual troubleshooting usually is required, Wyman notes. Using Ai Metrix tools, Broadwing now boasts 95 percent accuracy of DSL provisioning with no human intervention, he says, saving time and human resources costs. "This was such a successful job, Broadwing did a similar job with IP services like VPN," he adds.
Torline says Broadwing now uses the Ai Metrix inventory tool across all its voice and data product lines and is using the vendor's auto reconciliation tool NeuralStar to synch up its different OSSs.
Among other customers Ai Metrix helps with inventory/asset recovery are Comcast Business Communications and carrier consortium South Dakota Networks. Comcast Business Communications grew so fast it was hard to track its inventory. Now Ai Metrix is helping the company go back and see what's there. "They have a full suite of DWDM, SONET and ATM -- lots of non-SNMP devices." Unlike some inventory/asset discovery tools that only use SNMP, Wyman adds, Ai Metrix supports a variety of protocols including command line interface, ASCII, TL1 and Corba.
Edmond Baydian, product line director for SMARTS, offers another example of a carrier that discovered lost assets, in this case using the asset recovery tools included in the SMART InCharge ATM/frame relay availability manager product.
A European service provider and SMARTS were updating network asset inventory and found too many PVCs. What they found was multiple PVCs provisioned in the switch, but not terminated, Baydian says, explaining the provisioning system and database did not know the PVCs were not in use. "We recovered a million and a half pounds of assets -- that's a heavy problem," notes Baydian. "It was like an instant ROI, and the interesting thing is that was not an intended use of the product. So we said 'OK, is there a use for this?'" As of late August, SMARTS was working on creating a marketing program for that feature.
Meanwhile, other vendors are working on adding similar features to their portfolios. For example, Intec Telecom Systems plans to add a feature similar to auto discovery to its last mile service activation product by June of 2003, says Rick Woods, vice president of product management and business development.
Just the Beginning
Despite these activities, service providers only recently have begun focusing on the asset discovery/recovery part of inventory management.
"This has just really begun in the industry because up until now no one was worrying about expenses, but just doing fast provisioning," says Mark Mortensen, chief marketing officer with Granite Systems Inc., which sells an inventory product called Xng under its Xpercom line.
While reduced effort during the provisioning process still is the primary customer justification for purchasing the Granite product, says Mortensen, service providers now see capex recovery as a side benefit. He says people may be hesitant to admit they don't know what is in the network and are "often skeptical they'll be able to recover a lot" using asset recovery tools.
Mortensen doesn't share that skepticism. "Verizon Wireless nightly takes a dump in certain regions and does reconciliation against its database," says Mortensen. The carrier now has 98 percent database accuracy and "recovered an awful lot of private lines that they were being billed for that weren't in use," he says.
Service providers have had terrible inventory problems for years, notes Jeff Cotrupe, senior product marketing manager at Visionael, which helped Comcast discover network assets after it acquired Excite@Home. "Now service providers left standing really don't have a choice," he says. "They're looking into areas where they can carve out costs. They're at the first leg of the 12-step health program."
In addition to the discovery feature built into its Visionael 6.0 network resource management product, Visionael also offers a new feature called spares management. Through spares manage-ment, carriers can feed manual inventory data and e-purchasing records into an electronic ware-house so they know what equipment is on hand.
Two Heads...
As more service providers realize what they can gain from automated asset discovery/re-covery, several OSS vendors are forging part-nerships to help them exploit this opportunity.
For example, MetaSolv Software Inc. this month expects to make generally available a solution combining its own product with the auto-discovery features from CoManage, says Curtis Holmes, president and COO of MetaSolv.
"We talked to lots of different potential partners," says Holmes. "CoManage refocused to target auto discovery. We thought they would survive going forward, and we had a strong chemistry."
CoManage, which in late August only had trial customers, provides network-driven data integrity systems, which help service providers understand the integrity of network data.
Granite Systems also partners with CoManage as well as other vendors such as Acterna and Syndesis that do protocol and data conversion. These devices put the information into XML format to feed the Granite gateway, says Mortensen. "This allows us to do asset recovery and helps us clean the database because most databases are 40 percent in error," he says.
Cramer Systems Ltd., meanwhile, is partnering with Sheer Networks, a provider of service management solutions for broadband network operations, to offer telcos enhanced network auto-discovery and automated service activation capabilities intended to speed delivery of broadband services. The alliance combines Cramer's inventory management and provisioning automation capabilities with Sheer's service activation and live network autodiscovery solution, a package that will enable service providers to reconcile inventory, topology and service con-figurations to reflect the actual network and all changes to it as soon as they are made.
Cramer has long been involved in asset recovery, but Sheer's solution gives Cramer reach to equipment from a wider variety of equipment from different vendors, says Steve Plain, Cramer's vice president of product management.
However, Cramer is not just about "providing a better filing cabinet" says Plain. "Unless you look at business processes, you won't find stranded assets," he says. "Cramer addresses the business processes you need to find, assign and allocate resources and applies business rules to make sure you don't lose these assets in the first place." Cramer is interested in automating the depro-visioning process, which takes devices or circuits out of service, and makes a record of that change when a service is decommissioned.
Worldwide NRM Spending
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2002 $200 million, 25% commercial
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2005 $1.3 billion, 75% commercial
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NRM as part of overall OSS -- 2005 19% of service fulfillment spending 3% of total OSS spending
Source: RHK Inc.
Problems Caused by Inaccurate Inventory
| Problem | Causes | Impact |
| Delays in turning on new service delivery | Incorrect circuit designs result in rework | Failure to meet commitments Customer dissatisfaction Customer churn/lost revenue |
| High cost to turn on new service | Getting data from network equipment when database is wrong Reworked designs Multiple truck rolls |
Hurts profits |
| Failure to bill for all services | Billing system not updated to reflect all customer circuits Terminated services not actually removed from network |
Lost revenue |
| Stranded assets | Incomplete provisioning & deprovisioning Partial circuits carrying no service Available equipment and capacity that provisioning systems don't know about |
Higher network costs 20%-30% of network equipment assets are stranded in typical network Higher operations costs for inventory audits |
| Delays in repairing problems | Root cause can't be determined Technician dispatched to wrong location |
Failure to meet service level agreements Increased operations costs |
| Misconfiguration of equipment | Failure to keep track of past configuration changes Routing table and security setup mistakes |
Service outages Expensive repairs Security breaches |
| Source: RHK Inc. | ||
