Clearing the migration path: Unisphere, partners converge on convergence

With a market increasingly focused on data networking, service providers want to protect their network infrastructure investments while still taking advantage of the promise of next generation IP networks.

"Incumbent carriers who spent millions of dollars on billing systems don't want to be told to rip them out because 5% of the revenues will be coming from broadband in two years," said Brian Mahony, director of strategies and partnerships for Unisphere Solutions. They want to keep what they have.

The company that can deliver that protection will be a winner in the elusive end-to-end convergent solutions market. The offering from Unisphere could fit the bill.

The Siemens start-up has added some significant players to its Unisphere Management Center partnership program, rounding out its service-ready networking platform. The UMC suite of tools separates the service creationand assurance layers of network management from the delivery layer. It helps pro viders navigate the protocols and interfaces required to deploy and manage new services.

New UMC partners include AP Engines, Hewlett-Packard, TeleKnowledge and Xacct Technologies. Together the companies provide a solution for value-based billing by relating services created from any platform back to a common system in a common format from which they can be billed.

"It's more than just a list of partners that we need to cobble together for a billing solution. There is a strategy that is very much targeted to the particular services we are enabling," Mahony said. That strategy begins with the company's hardware platform, which includes core and edge routers and a voice mediation switch, and ends with its essential software components - the policy engine and meta directory (see figure).

Unisphere's new partners provide solutions in four areas that are key to creating and billing for services in an IP-based network: data collection and correlation, rating, billing mediation and converged billing. HP's Smart Internet Usage and Xacct's XACCTusage mediation products compete to provide the data collection piece of Unisphere's solution.

"Getting usage details out of the network was relatively simple in the [public network]. You could look at a switch and get most everything you need to know about the traffic going through that switch. With IP, that usage data is distributed throughout the network," said Dana Kreitter, marketing manager for HP's SIU.

The SIU enables billing on a per-subscriber basis, depending on the services or the quality of service. It also can be used as an operations tool that provides hourly plotting of protocol traffic, for example.

AP Engines provides a billing mediation processor that helps Unisphere target incumbent carriers by taking IP traffic groomed from a router and putting it into a format that a Class 5 switch can read and use. That format typically is the automatic message accounting call detail record. This allows incumbents to use their current billing systems and deploy IP-based services, Mahony said.

This capability makes AP Engines key to Unisphere's legacy migration strategy. The company employs a leading authority on the AMA billing format commonly used in circuit-switched billing.

"Our founders looked at next generation services and realized a huge a hole in tying these new systems into the incumbent billing world," said Mark Heslop, director of product marketing for AP Engines.

TeleKnowledge takes the usage-based billing capabilities provided by HP and Xacct to the next level: value-based billing. Unisphere uses TeleKnowledge's rating engine, which defines the advanced tariff model for value-based services.

"Billing is not the major issue here," said Itay Arad, marketing manager for TeleKnowledge. "It's how to maintain and leverage relationships with hundreds of content providers and build revenue models that can make all sides happy."

Portugal Telecom recently agreed to deploy Unisphere's hardware and UMC network and services management system. It will begin offering services within the next few months.