Digital Fairway leveraging EDS win

In terms of business validation, it doesn’t get much bigger for a vendor of operations support system software than the 10-year contract Toronto-based Digital Fairway announced last week with EDS.

The deal is significant in several ways for Digital Fairway and the Flewelling brothers, Mark and Russ, who helped co-found the company two years ago. Providing software solutions to a company as large and complex as EDS says something about the performance of the company’s product. The long-term contract also says something about the company’s viability.

“EDS’ outsourcing contracts with their customers are long term, and this contract parallels their need to have a commitment from their vendors to [honor] those contracts for as long as EDS is obligated to provide service,” said Paul Andrus, vice president of major accounts for Digital Fairway.

As part of this contract announcement, EDS also said it will be extending its internally deployed On Demand Infrastructure for provisioning communications services, which is enabled by Digital Fairway’s eOSS software, to its Fortune 500 and other enterprise clients that outsource their communications services to EDS.

That says something about the product’s flexibility and scalability, all the validation Digital Fairway needs to prove to the market it can solve real problems for a variety of business scenarios.

“We absolutely think we will get a positive response from the market on this,” said Mark Flewelling, vice president of product strategy at Digital Fairway. “We think it will be a catalyst for us going into 2003 to have this relationship.”

Digital Fairway’s eOSS helps EDS and its clients order and distribute telecom services, manage assets and monitor service level agreements in an automated environment. The eOSS platform is Web-based and includes four main components: an order manager, inventory manager, service activator and an application integration platform (AIP).

The order manager handles customer acquisition, order entry and workflow. The inventory manager handles the assign, design and service modeling functions for individual customers. The service activator automates the provisioning and activation of services for IP-based, circuit-switched and wireless networks. And the AIP provides a framework for integrating these functions with other OSS applications such as billing and network management.

“We provide EDS with the ability to efficiently manage across multiple services and service providers,” Andrus said. “They were looking for a way to get out from under 40 years of legacy [infrastructure]. Now they have that capability.”

Digital Fairway is one of a growing number of independent software vendors building their solutions according to the open application interface guidelines of the OSS through Java (OSS/J) initiative. The company’s eOSS is based on XML, Java and J2EE technologies.

Atlanta-based Cbeyond, an all IP-based integrated service provider to small businesses, picked Digital Fairway’s eOSS suite in October to manage its provisioning, activation and inventory.