Out of the box, Solution pushes partnerships and professional services >BY CHRIS BUCHOLTZ, West Coast Bureau Chief

An integrated solution targeted at carriers, Internet service providers and cable TV operators will focus on professional services and products from a number of vendors to provide a comprehensive approach to network management.

The solution, OptivityServices from Billerica, Mass.-based Bay Networks' Internet/telecom business unit, will draw from a set of best-of-breed software and hardware components and consulting resources to provide carriers a timely and effective way to deploy custom services for specific provider environments, said Dave Danielson, product line manager for Bay Networks.

"The people setting up network operations centers are being besieged by box vendors and people trying to sell stand-alone management systems," he said. "We want to deliver a complete, integrated answer because that will be the key to getting these operations up and running quickly.

Bay Networks' own Optivity Enterprise network element management application, designed for large-scale business networks, has been modified to easily integrate applications from other vendors-a key to bringing the system into the multivendor world of the carriers.

"Customers have told us that there's no way they would abandon existing applications and then re-train people to use a new set of applications," Danielson said.

Bay Networks' professional services unit will also be available to carriers to provide software installation and implementation. This unit will ensure that carriers' applications work within the solution's framework.

"If you're a service provider-and especially if you're a new competitor in the market-how do you handle custom deployments?" he said. "Because of personnel resources, it's a problem for them, but at Bay, we've been doing this kind of work on the enterprise side for years.

While the adaptions to Optivity Enterprise were made in-house, five other telecom-specific components of the solution came from Bay Networks' partners.

Toronto-based Syndesis Ltd. will provide Service Provisioning System, a system for network provisioning. MIL 3 Inc., Washington, will contribute its OPNET Planner network modeling and simulation application for network simulation and visualization.

Wide Area Network Design Laboratory Inc., based in Warren, N.J., is being tapped for its Network Planning and Analysis Tools. TRENDsnmp+, a product of DeskTalk Systems Inc., Torrance, Calif., will provide large-scale data collection for the system. Finally, the U.K.'s Anite Systems will provide a billing solution based on its ASB billing application.

"These partnerships do help [Bay Networks] make the jump from being perceived as a [local area network] company to one that can compete in the telecommunications market," said Michael Howard, an analyst at San Jose-based market research firm Infonetics Research.

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