OSS in a world of its own

At most industry trade shows, vendors of operations support systems and business support systems take a back seat to the flashy equipment and device players. But last week at TeleStrategies' Billing & OSS World conference in Miami, OSS/BSS vendors got the opportunity to strut their stuff.

Two such vendors, MetaSolv Software and Nakina Systems, made their announcements early. MetaSolv did something it's been too busy reacting to market dynamics for the last several years to do; it introduced new, completely homegrown products.

In keeping with its primary competitors, such as Cramer, which introduced a string of new products earlier this year, and Telcordia, which has been pushing them out the door on a regular basis over the last year, MetaSolv has broadened its portfolio.

After turning in what CEO Curtis Holmes called a solid performance in its quarterly report two weeks ago — a quarter that included 11 contract wins — MetaSolv launched three new products. It added a configuration management product, a subscriber and service management product and Time-to-Market OSS, a set of tools for introducing and incubating — or testing — new services that leverages MetaSolv's Provisioning 5 solution.

The MetaSolv Configuration Management supports proactive configuration, service archiving and version maintenance for multi-vendor networks. It works in conjunction with the company's activation product and “allows us to extend our activation leadership into the area of configuration management,” Holmes said.

The solution provides real-time capabilities for determining not only what the network configuration is and was but also what it should be going forward.

MetaSolv's new Subscriber and Service Management product provides a unified view of user data across domains to efficiently manage both subscribers and services. This one works with MetaSolv's and other vendor's inventory systems to leverage existing OSS investment. It comes with a specification catalog that defines subscribers, products, services, configurations and rules; a repository of managed or federated data; and an integration framework for promoting interoperability and collaboration. China Telecom is currently deploying the service-oriented, architecture-based product.

Holmes said this product was the first one in the last five years to be developed entirely from scratch at MetaSolv. “You can imagine the development team is pretty excited to finally develop a new product after years of re-architecting and customizing existing products.”

Nakina Systems also broadened its portfolio with a new version of its Network OS platform that features enhancements for device configuration and performance measurement. One lets service providers set up and commission network elements; the other gathers data about their performance.

The Nakina Network OS 5 is a carrier-grade network operating system that serves as a mediation layer and single point of integration between the network and higher-level network management and operations support systems.

“Part of our differentiator is we really understand networks,” said Mary O'Neill, vice president of market development for Nakina. “Most of us came from equipment vendors, and every one of our designers has both software and equipment knowledge.”

The new release extends the platform to higher-level Nakina network applications and third-party OSS applications. It features a centralized collection of performance measurement statistics and device configuration services that leverage configuration templates.

Because Nakina acts as its own layer in the network and communicates directly with multi-vendor elements, the new capabilities make the system 60% faster at setting up and commissioning devices in the network.