Agilent product rollouts continue

ATLANTA--Agilent Technologies introduced several new products this week at Supercomm, demonstrating some of the results of the company’s stated commitment to continued research and development throughout the downturn. The solutions range from software toolkits for data mining SS7 messages to compact remote fiber test units.

The Agilent OSS data mining toolkit captures data from SS7 messages, which different departments within a carrier can interrogate for improving revenue assurance, business intelligence and network optimization. It can also be used by wholesale billing personnel to reconcile differences and identify suspicious activity.

“There are lots of fields in the SS7 message that never make it to the billing record,” said Bob D’Eletto, worldwide business and sales development manager for next generation networks at Agilent. The software probes used by Agilent to collect the data captures messages that are filtered out of some call detail records.

The toolkit is built on Agilent’s acceSS7 business intelligence technology. It provides prepackaged and customizable reports and graphical representations of the analyzed data sets for both wireless and wireline providers.

Agilent also introduced its accessFIBER 53000 series compact remote fiber test unit. It provides fiber optic network management and testing using data collected from hundreds of remote fiber optic test units deployed in the network.

“The probes are almost all in silicon, which is a new wave in probe technology,” said Donna Bastien, worldwide OSS marcom manager for Agilent.

The accessFIBER unit and associated software can help maintenance and operations personnel pinpoint the exact location of fiber cuts and identify the causes of service degradation. The probes, called accessFIBER unified network performance agents, collect performance data and determine the severity of a problem using preset thresholds.

This solution uses both Agilent’s test technology as well as its OSS solutions, which identifies another trend in OSS, according to Bastien.

Using Sprint’s One Sprint concept as an example of the ways Agilent is melding its products, Bastien said, “Consolidation in the [service provider’s] OSS is a trend that needed to happen. And as the industry consolidates we will see more of that.”

Agilent also introduced a test solution for characterizing Sonet/SDH high and low order virtual concatenation. The solution is part of the company’s OmniBER OTN test platform. Virtual concatenation enables data services such as Ethernet to make more efficient use of bandwidth in Sonet/SDH networks.

Finally, Agilent introduced the N4180A network tester, which is designed to accelerate the deployment of connection- and content-aware devices such as firewalls, intrusion detection and filtering gateways.