Nakina upgrades platform, partnerships

Nakina Systems announced a global integrations and marketing agreement with HP and released a new version of its Network Operating System. The company also added some OSS expertise to its board with the appointments of Jay Borden, former CEO of inventory company Granite Systems, and Frank Girard, former vice chairman and CEO of Comverse Network Systems.

The new version of the company’s flagship Nakina Network OS 6 includes three major enhancements. It now can facilitate the elimination of stranded bandwidth in a service provider’s network, which runs an estimated 20% 40% of assets.

“It’s really never been measured, but whatever the percentage, it is significant,” said Mary O’Neill, vice president of market development at Nakina Systems.

Nakina Network OS 6 discovers physical and logical network constructs as well as alarms and events from multi-vendor networks and correlates them with inventory to detect and recover those stranded assets. The system is currently under trial with a Tier 1 operator and Nakina expects to see results by the end of this year.

The second change is it provides a software development kit that gives other OSS developers and IT groups within service providers to extend Nakina Network OS 6 with vendor-specific, differentiating features.

“Any OSS vendor can make use of the information from our discovery capabilities,” O’Neill said.

The third enhancement is for network equipment vendors that want to extend the OS to support functionality provided in their network elements. Currently vendors can acquire a carrier-grade element and network management system (EMS/NMS) solution by building a simple device driver (network adapter) to interface the Nakina OS. Now, the system allows equipment vendors to extend the management system to manage all of their specialized functionality, allowing their development teams to focus on the creation of value-added, differentiating features rather than re-inventing basic fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security management (FCAPS) features.

‘We can partner with a lot of people because our OS is an abstraction layer,” O’Neill said.

These enhancements strengthen Nakina’s strategy collapsing the EMS and NMS layers of network management in order to provide a single point of integration between network elements and higher-level OSS and business support systems (BSS).

O’Neill said that while early customer deployments focused on transport networks, today over 60% of the elements managed by Nakina are next-generation Ethernet service devices and other network element types outside of the transport domain.

Nakina’s partnership with HP is, like most initiatives in the back office, designed to help service providers roll out services more efficiently. To this end, the companies have pre-integrated Nakina’s OS with HP’s provisioning and performance management product: HP Service Activator Software and HP Performance Insight Software. HP also will contribute consulting and integrations services.