DIRECTOR FINDS AUDIENCE IN GERMANY

Fed up with depending on his equipment manufacturers to update and coordinate the alarm and other network data outputs that fed his network management system every time those vendors came out with new releases, O2 Germany's director of network operations, Reinhard Herr, took a chance in January on an unknown, unproven software vendor — Telcordia Technologies.

Winning the contract to supply O2 Germany with a service assurance solution wasn't the biggest sale Telcordia has ever made, but it could be a game changer for the company formerly known as Bellcore. The sale of Telcordia's Service Director was the company's first sale of an OSS product in Germany and the first installation anywhere of this particular product — for which the company has high expectations.

“As the first consummated sale of Service Director anywhere in the world, it is verification of a market we thought was forming in the mobility space — and that's service assurance,” said Robbie Cohen, senior group vice president for wireless, cable and emerging markets at Telcordia.

Herr confirmed the existence of this rumored market. “Everyone around the world is looking for service assurance,” he said.

Service Director is similar to what the industry has known as a manager-of-managers — a system that can monitor and report on quality-of-service levels and help diagnose network trouble by gathering performance data from disparate network elements. The product's claim to fame, and the feature that got it in O2's door, is its service model concept, which allows the operator to model new services and reflect them in the service assurance evaluation without having to change any of the network elements or their performance output.

It also helps operators manage their service level agreements, something O2 plans to do as it tries to grow its enterprise business to complement its 6.2 million consumer customers.

Stratecast Partners OSS program manager Scott Donahue said Service Director is one of Telcordia's more interesting new products. He said service assurance was an interesting issue, but that he didn't expect it to be a big market.

Perhaps more important for Telcordia than the actual sale was the manner in which the sale was won and the apparent success of its implementation, according to O2. But first, an overview of the problem.

“We had spent a lot of money trying to come to something like an umbrella management system from our suppliers,” Herr said. “But we were always getting behind. We had a lot of detailed data, but we couldn't combine it into one view.”

Herr wanted an off-the-shelf product that could bring together all his existing [hardware] systems, data records, end-to-end measurements, element management systems and other data, particularly related to GPRS, into a single service view.

Eleven vendors later, he gave Telcordia a shot — but not before some serious internal debate. “We hadn't had any contact with Telcordia before and recognized it was a risk going with a new vendor,” Herr said. “So we had a lot of sessions with them and started a pilot to see how they would handle things and what their approach was.”

This is a typical gauntlet for most vendors, but Telcordia is not used to being an unknown. For that matter, it isn't all that used to straight software sales. Nonetheless, the O2 sale could help the company advance on the three strategies CEO Matt Desch instituted almost two years ago: Turn Telcordia into a product company, expand internationally and build in emerging markets (wireless and cable) division.

The implementation, as it went, could help silence critics who have said Telcordia is too big, too slow, too unresponsive and thinks it has all the answers.

“In the end, what convinced us was their flexibility and willingness to listen to us and our approach and ideas,” Herr said. “They didn't try to overwhelm us with anything.”

Another box on Telcordia's image checklist filled in by the O2 implementation is its claim to openness marked by the relatively short implementation time for interfacing with all of O2's systems.

“We were able to walk in and create the necessary adapters (application interfaces) on the spot that allowed us to collect the data from their different probes,” Cohen said.

Cohen admits that service assurance, while important, is not a mission-critical implementation that requires the replacement of key network components. It's more a matter of turning up the data receptors so all the network fault and performance data is pointed at Telcordia's Service Director.

So the implementation could be considered simple compared to others the once project-oriented caretaker to the carriers has known. But as a proof-point, it couldn't have been more important.

“Every promise was delivered on time, so I can say right now that it fits to their promise,” Herr said.

It is testimonials like that that Telcordia will need as it peddles its software around the globe.