Telcordia Technologies Inc. this week gave a name to its new strategy of “openness.” At a press conference yesterday in New York City, the OSS company unveiled the Elementive portfolio, which it says will enable service providers to bring new services to market more quickly and affordably by delivering preintegrated software modules from Telcordia and select partner companies.
While the company Tuesday introduced some new products and rebranded several existing products as part of the Elementive effort and announced four new partners as part of the initiative, Telcordia CEO Matt Desch emphasized that Elementive is about more than just products. “It’s about an approach to the marketplace and a change in direction,” said Desch, who has significantly changed the culture at the OSS giant formerly know as Bellcore since joining the company about a year ago. “It’s not just about products or tools,” he added. “It’s about kick-starting an industry.”
Executives at Telcordia noted that service providers today need to introduce services quickly – within weeks, rather than months or years – and want to be able to take those services off the market if they don’t meet expectations.
“Elementive addresses customer concerns of how to construct and deliver new services at lower costs,” says Ragui Kamel, Telcordia group president. “While the idea of different software modules plugging into a bus is not new, what’s new is these elements are preintegrated.” He adds that Elementive is a new concept, but many of its elements have been in use for several months at BellSouth in a work force management application; at British Telecom for physical inventory; at Comcast for voice over cable; at Verizon for DSL provisioning; and at Telus for service introduction.
Elementive, which is based on industry standards including J2EE and TMF 513, is designed around three key portfolios – Managed IP, Optical and Wireless. The Telcordia Managed IP Portfolio allows carriers to optimize resources and lower costs, speed delivery of high-margin IP services, improve network performance and quality of service, benefit from rapid service creation and better manage service level agreements and IP network services, according to the company. The Telcordia Optical Management Portfolio allows carriers to centralize management of complex optical networks, accelerate integration of current and legacy systems, and gain new levels of control over their networks, the company says. And the Telcordia Mobility Portfolio provides wireless carriers an opportunity to transform their network’s capabilities through an open framework, create an automated, low-cost business process environment and construct a platform for network and organizational growth.
When stepping in as CEO, Desch made clear that wireless would be a significant new focus for Telcordia. Terry Vega, whom Desch hired as group president – wireless, cable and emerging markets, says Telcordia had in the past reached out to the wireless market primarily by repositioning existing products designed for wireless applications.
Now wireless is a key focus for the company. “Matt is fond of saying that we’ve hired more wireless people in the past five months than we have in the past five years,” says Vega, who indicates the company is looking at acquisitions in the wireless space.
Telcordia already has 85 percent market share in the U.S. for wireless LNP, she says, and the company’s prepaid applications based on ISCP are gaining a global market presence. (Vega says that ISCP, a service creation platform popular in prepaid applications, will be enhanced to support any new services.) About 3 percent of Telcordia’s business today comes from the mobile sector, and the company anticipates that will grow to about 15 percent by 2006.
(In addition to the new wireless push, Telcordia says it’s also moving aggressively into international markets, especially in Europe. About 9 percent of Telcordia’s business is currently outside North America. The company anticipates that number will rise to 20 percent over the next three years.)
The first set of products and services in the Elementive portfolio includes the following nine new or rebranded software modules.
Telcordia Service Composer is a new integrated environment for the rapid development and introduction of new services. This object-oriented environment was designed to allow carriers to model, develop, bundle and customize potential new service offerings while simplifying and streamlining the service definition process.
Also new is the Telcordia Service Director, which enables carriers to have open, multilayer, user-configurable software that provides quality of service monitoring and reporting, comprehensive service level agreement management, and problem resolution for CDMA, GSM, GPRS and third-generation mobile networks. Orange in the U.K. is currently testing this product.
The new Telcordia Service Express allows carriers to deliver new service offerings and achieve operational readiness quickly, thanks to increased automation. With Service Express, carriers can automate delivery of new, high-bandwidth services for increased revenue opportunities.
The company has separated and enhanced the following two products. Telcordia Inventory is an operational support system that manages multivendor network equipment, facilities, circuits and connections across multiple network layers to increase productivity and efficiency. Telcordia Activator provides centralized configuration for multivendor wireless and wireline networks creating connections and configurations on Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 networks, performing management functions across a range of technologies, including MPLS, ATM, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, CDMA, and WCDMA.
Also an existing, enhanced product, the Telcordia Surveillance Manager proactively manages network faults by employing an alarm analysis engine to process alarms, alerts and messages from all areas of carriers’ IP, ATM, optical, and wireless networks.
The Telcordia Service Level Manager is new. This product automatically manages quality of service and monitors network performance against IP-centric SLAs by identifying potential problems or service level degradations before they significantly impact the customer.
The existing Telcordia Network Engineer simplifies planning for inside and outside plant networks of all sizes and technologies.
Telcordia Signaling Network Activation Manager provides centralized provisioning of multivendor signal transfer point and mobile switching center network elements including the administration of routing table configurations.
Additional services and components of the new portfolio that help customers further customize their business operation systems for IP, DSL, optical and wireless, include Telcordia Consulting Services and Telcordia Adapter Toolkit, which is used to create, modify, and maintain adapter plug-ins to element management systems.
On the partner front, Telcordia this week added CoManage, ConceptWave, Dimension Data and Sheer Networks to its partner list. Telcordia’s existing partners include Atreus, a service creation environment company in which Telcordia holds an investment; systems integrator Cap Gemini Ernst & Young; Granite Systems, an inventory company in which Telcordia’s parent SAIC holds an investment; IBM, JacobsRimell, Micromuse and Openet.
Telcordia and CoManage are working together offer telecom carriers a solution to ensure seamless data integrity and accuracy across service activation, inventory management and network design functions. Telcordia and CoManage have integrated CoManage TrueSource, with Telcordia Activator, Telcordia Network Engineer, and Telcordia Equipment Manager solutions.
Telcordia and ConceptWave Software Inc. are accelerating service introduction and enhance operational efficiency by introducing ConceptWave Order Care into the Telcordia order automation solutions for order negotiation and management and exception management
Telcordia and Dimension Data jointly develop, market and deliver fully integrated operations management solutions that enable service providers to realize the maximum investment from their next generation networks on a global scale. The combination of Telcordia’s network and service provisioning and assurance suite with Dimension Data’s experience in network management provides service providers with a scaleable choice for bringing value-added business applications, such as voice, data and video services to market quickly, according to the companies.
And Telcordia and Sheer deliver an integrated solution for managing ATM, DSL and IP-VPN services, incorporating Telcordia’s Fault management and Inventory database link, together with the discovery component of the Sheer BOS (Broadband Operating Supervisor).
Some industry analysts questioned Telcordia’s choice of the struggling Sheer as a partner. But Steve Noon, group senior vice president of NGS strategy & initiatives, says Sheer is one of the vendors in a key account with SingTel.
