CATALYST PROJECT UNCORKS JINI

Despite the economic downturn, OSS vendors still have something to prove. They get their chance this week through a series of showcases that demonstrate various proofs-of-concept, including Jini, a newcomer to the plug-and-play promised land of the TeleManagement Forum's NGOSS.

As they continue the search for the ultimate architecture for automated service provisioning and other flow-through OSS processes, a mixture of start-up and stalwart solutions developers at TeleManagement World in Las Vegas plan to demonstrate the first technology-specific implementation of the forum's New Generation Operations Software and Support initiative.

Dubbed Fine Grain NGOSS, this project is one of five implementations being demonstrated through the ongoing Catalyst projects hosted by the TeleManagement Forum. But it is the first to highlight the distributed object capabilities of Jini technology.

Sun Microsystems' developed Jini as a network architecture that could enable spontaneous assembly and interaction of the services and devices on a network. The Fine Grain NGOSS project introduces that capability to the back office.

Participating vendors are pushing forward with developments they hope will jump-start the industry with cost-effective new approaches to tendering services. Some also are hoping to jump-start their own fledgling companies through displays of competence and compatibility.

The NGOSS project is co-sponsored by WorldCom and CH2M HILL, an international engineering and technical services firm founded in Corvallis, Ore., in 1946. Rookie Catalyst participant Valaran, a provider of business process and network integration software, is leading the project.

On the surface, Catalyst projects...demonstrate the flexibility and neutrality of the NGOSS framework....

Valaran will be joined by other first-time participants such as IntaMission, IntelliDEN, Blaze Software, Dorado Software and Turin Networks. These vendors will demonstrate Jini-based solutions for two requirements of the NGOSS initiative. The first shows how policy-driven business process management and distributed computing can introduce and provision services such as gigabit Ethernet instantaneously simply by plugging in an OC-48 trunk card.

“The idea is as new transports and technology come on-line, the existing customer base can be queried according to policies and can be targeted, switched and activated in real time,” said Aleta Ricciardi, co-founder and executive vice president of product strategy for Valaran.

The group's second goal is to demonstrate real-time quality of service (QOS) management by using those same policies to monitor potential service level agreement (SLA) violations and initiate a switch-over before that potential turns into penalties.

“The preponderance of deployed SLA management tools doesn't enable any real-time QOS management,” Ricciardi said. “This is a more dynamic way of both monitoring network performance and managing the network and the customer's expectations.”

On the surface, Catalyst projects are not in direct competition with one another. They demonstrate the flexibility and neutrality of the NGOSS framework by showing that any technology that works within its constructs is a viable one. Below the surface, however, companies are betting the farm on one platform or another even as they work with other participants trying to demonstrate their ability to work in various environments.

Turin is one of the first optical transport providers to take the leap of embedding Jini technology into each blade, or circuit board, of its optical transport platform. Embedding Jini announces new service availability to the network automatically whenever a new card is installed in the switch.

“They are incorporating natively the primary goal of NGOSS, which is the discovery and description of network devices,” Ricciardi said.

Turin, a Petaluma, Calif.-based start-up celebrating its second birthday this month, provides the aggregation and switching platform for the project. It recently began shipping product to its beta customers and expects to be joined in the Jini camp soon by other players, including Cisco Systems, which is supplying equipment for the project.

“The overall thrust is to enable things like bandwidth-on-demand and plug-and-play management capabilities by making the network smart instead of relying on the human touch,” said Turin's product marketing manager Kevin Wade.

Charged with providing some of that intelligence, 3-year-old Dorado will dip into its stable of Redcell network infrastructure software products. Redcell includes a series of device drivers that attempt to govern network behavior in a dynamic fashion based on user profiles. These drivers support the company's concept of “network personalization” and will be used to extend that concept to non-Jini systems through interfaces to Valaran's Jini implementation.

Through Jini and JavaSpaces, an application interface and distributed programming model developed by Sun, Dorado can perform look-up services to determine where resources are housed on the network. “[This] allows the network to explicitly deliver a new service when a user calls in to request it without a lot of back office [interaction],” said Jerry McDowell, Dorado's vice president of Redcell product development. Dorado is one of those companies backing all horses. It does not incorporate Jini natively but exposes the capabilities of the equipment it supports to applications that do. McDowell calls this an interim step as Jini and other technologies like Microsoft's .NET (which Dorado also supports) are rolled out.

“I would love to see Jini take off because I feel it is a more robust offering,” he said. “But whether it will have the marketing clout behind it is going to be up to Sun and a lot of smaller companies taking that approach.”

And that certainly won't be decided this week. “The idea of the Catalyst projects is to bring forward particular ideas and to prove their validity by demonstrating that they work,” McDowell said. “But it will be up to the market to decide what they like.”