In the quest to become “lean operators,” telcos are increasingly looking to automate provisioning of relatively low-margin, high-volume services while establishing flexible platforms that enable them to quickly bring new features and functionality to higher margin services.
“A combination of self-provisioning and flexibility are the twin pillars of provisioning,” says Jim Warner, president of the TeleManagement Forum (TMF), a nonprofit organization focusing on telecom OSS matters, including pushing the “lean operator” theme.
Automation
Telecom Italia is a good example of this new trend, having recently implemented a new OSS to automate DSL provisioning in a move to offer the service to a far larger subscriber base. The carrier’s new OSS includes TIBCO BusinessFactor for Business Activity Monitoring to ensure service level and sufficient business performance in ADSL provisioning; Granite Systems’ Xng software for service and network inventory modeling and the Xng Process Automator to automatically create new subscriber services; Micromuse Netcool technology for fault consolidation and service management; and, the Syndesis NetProvisionbased solution for interdomain service activation of new convergent services.
“Telecom Italia wanted to go strongly into DSL — wanted 40 percent of its users to subscribe to DSL,” explains Mark Mortensen, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of product management for Granite Systems Inc. “So they needed to provision 5,000 or more subscribers a day. Telecom Italia had been doing about an hour of DSL work for every subscriber before they came to these vendors to automate DSL.”
In May 2003, Telecom Italia’s Domestic Wireline Unit completed its company-wide rollout of the DSL flow-through provisioning system, which has the flexibility to handle 25 separate DSL-based services and can “comfortably process” service peaks of 21,500 DSL orders per day.
New Generation OSS
Implementation of the new system, which is based on the TMF’s New Generation Operations Support Systems and Software (NGOSS) principles, garnered Telecom Italia the Operational Excellence Award from the forum at the organization’s recent TeleManagement World show in Las Vegas. Warner explains the basic tenets of NGOSS include a loosely coupled architecture, distributed computing, separation of process from data, common communications mechanisms and use of workflow. “There’s nothing revolutionary about NGOSS … the revolution is pulling them together in telecom,” Warner says.
Other telcos moving to NGOSS include AT&T and BT. “AT&T is retiring an OSS system a week, so as long as they don’t introduce new systems that don’t become [single-service] legacy systems, then eventually you do get [to NGOSS],” says Warner. “Provided you have rules-based systems that can deal with exceptions, you’re OK. eTom and SID play here.”
The eTom, or enhanced telecom operations map, is a key component of NGOSS. Warner describes eTom as the business process map that shows how things work together; it addresses such functions as fulfillment, assurance, billing, resource management and enterprise management. SID, which stands for shared information and data model, is the systems view that can go on top of eTom,Warner says.
| Meet eTom and SID | |||||||||||||||||||
The following features are incorporated in the most recent version of the eTOM:
| The following features and models are included in the updated version of the SID:
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New Services
While DSL automation has already been achieved by carriers such as Telecom Italia, automating IP VPN has been a tougher nut to crack, according to most accounts. Vendors are addressing this issue.
For example, at TeleManagement World, Lucent came out with a new release of its Navis Provisioning Manager software that adds support for IP VPN provisioning and management.
Also in Las Vegas, one of the three featured Catalyst projects focused on “Managing IP Services with NGOSS.” The Catalyst program, sponsored by the TMF, allows service providers to pose particular OSS challenges to see if vendors can create a solution within six months. This particular Catalyst initiative, sponsored by British Telecom and Vodafone, demonstrates automated service provisioning and customercentric service assurance for IP VPN and Internet packet telephony services. Vendor participants include Cisco Systems, Digital Fairway Corp., Fujitsu, MBT and NEC. “It’s about adding new standards for high-value IP services,” Cisco’s Kevin McCoy said of the Catalyst product. “Also, it’s using eTom, and SID as our data model for information interchange.”
David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing at MetaSolv Software, explains that IP VPN setup and management is “very complex,” since service providers need to implement quality of service; provision a large number of network elements; and have an end-to-end view of the network to implement and support the service. “If someone reboots a router or reconfigures an interface, it could take out the service, so we always provide stateful overview of the service,” he says. “Then, you get into QoS and how it’s applied. There is no consistent implementation of QoS, which means it is flexible but it also is a challenge.”
MetaSolv sells an IP service activation solution that addresses IP VPN provisioning. Infrastructure vendor Ericsson recently announced plans to integrate and resell that MetaSolv solution with its Packet Backbone Network management suite.
Flexible Platforms
Whatever the service type, an underlying theme in OSS is to try to get to a single platform to provision and otherwise support multiple services.
“The term of flow-through provisioning has become debased over time,” says Robert Curran, director of marketing communications at Cramer Systems. “People often talk about provisioning of a specific service, but [the question is] how do you do it in a generic way with a multipurpose processing system?”
This is what carriers are moving toward.
“We’re working with BT on a solution that manages a variety of broadband services,” he says. “Getting to that generic means before you do services, you need process management. Instead of people just bolting on another stovepipe, they’re looking to do it generically.”
In moving its network from circuit to packet technology, Sprint is also replacing multiple, “very specific” OSSs (in this case about eight) with a single MetaSolv solution, adds Sharpley.
“People are looking for an application with platform-like characteristics so you can respond quickly to new service requirements,” says Douglas A. Fantuzzi, group senior vice president of portfolio management at Telcordia.“We don’t even build GUIs; we just expose the system and let people decide how they want to do it. So we’re not specifying provisioning flows.”
Last month, Telcordia expected to announce a deal with “a top service provider” that planned to use the vendor’s activation solution in just such a scenario, Fantuzzi said, adding, “NGOSS is a critical part of our strategy going forward.”
