Under the sponsorship of British Telecom plc and France Telecom, eight leading networking and operation support systems vendors joined to unveil the TeleManagement Forum “Catalyst” project to open the TMF’s TeleManagement World conference and expo in Nice, France, today.
Formed to help metropolitan-area gigE service providers deliver flexibly tiered service plans and bandwidth on demand, and to guarantee uninterrupted service and quality of service assurance, the Catalyst team includes Cisco Systems Inc., Daleen Technologies Inc., Emperative Inc., Extreme Networks Inc., LINMOR Technologies Inc., Quallaby Corp., Satyam Computer Services Ltd. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
According to Catalyst participants, by bringing together leading Ethernet and synchronous optical network hardware functionality, as well as OSS capabilities, the Catalyst project responds to customer demands by demonstrating flow-through provisioning of bandwidth on demand, billing for tiered services, and service level agreement management for the maximization of network utilization.
The demonstrations, accounting for the entire sale/provision/usage/bill/retain, customer/subscriber lifecycle, include the following scenarios: adding a new service to an existing customer, temporarily modifying a customer's service (such as for a bandwidth-on-demand order), changing a customer's entire service plan, and reporting SLA violations and adjusting invoices to reflect those violations.
"Dynamic, burstable bandwidth will be the foundation for future service offerings," says Deb Mielke, Principal of Treillage Network Strategies Inc. "Traditional metro-SONET/SDH networks have been too rigid to make this possible, but solutions such as this Catalyst project demonstrate the viability of existing technology for delivering flexibly provisioned services billed on a more granular basis."
