Competition breeds TMF lovefest

TeleManagement World in Las Vegas last week was chock full of interoperability and exuded a camaraderie rarely seen in the telecom industry. One reason for that is because the operations support system arena is growing and changing so quickly that vendors can hardly keep up, and service providers are willing to work together to push forward standard models for interfaces.

Among vendors touting their management systems, EHPT launched its NetFusion package, comprised of three existing management products: the Billing Management Platform; the NetCharger, which provides service-centric billing and customer care; and the Analyzer, which checks performance and provides information on how to optimize the network (see figure).

"We're leveraging the billing management product with the billing product and adding the business intelligence aspect," said Leif Thor, EHPT's director of business development for North America. "NetFusion has the tools to run, bill and optimize the communication services [by collecting] information about the network. It is using the data for business intelligence."

The information is culled from data that carriers already collect but can't mine efficiently. "You could have done this before with data warehousing, but no one has put it together," Thor said.

The cooperative spirit of OSS vendors was evident in the TMF's Catalyst Showcase demonstrations, which simulated successful proofs of concept for key requirements of next generation OSSs.

These exhibits, which are comprised of OSS components from multiple vendors, demonstrated that multivendor, multitechnology solutions can be implemented - in a very short time frame.

The SLA Management Project showcased a comprehensive service level agreement (SLA) process using non-customized, commercially available products from Amdocs, Cisco Systems, CrossKeys, EHPT and Hekimian. The scenario included both frame relay and an IP virtual private network (VPN) service, integrating systems for performance data collection and analysis, SLA management and billing. The demo proved that carriers can generate SLAs and execute them in frame relay and IP VPN environments - a rarity in the industry.

Not only did the Catalyst Showcases encourage interoperability, but they also helped vendors focus their development efforts. In the SLA showcase, CrossKeys learned that the potential for its Resolve Toolkit far outweighed the other software products that it was working on.

"We found through the Catalyst project that Toolkit is the way to go," said Peter Cook, Resolve product manager.

A separate project focused on IP service management with a goal of integrating multiple components - order management, activation services, IP domain management, service assurance, routing and bandwidth management and usage-based billing - for Layer 3 VPN service. As a result, new VPN services were created and the appropriate service level definitions were updated automatically in the SLA management application. The network activation system provisioned the routers while all of the systems were integrated using CORBA interfaces. The demo system also used multiprotocol label switching as a traffic control enabler. Participants included Architel Systems, BullSoft, Cisco, CrossKeys, EHPT, France Telecom, Japan Telecom, NTT and Telcordia Technologies.

The Connection and Service Management project provisioned end-to-end IP and ATM services using and solutions from Alcatel, Astracon, Compaq Computer, Fujitsu and Newbridge Networks. The group met its goals of ensuring interoperability in a multidomain, multivendor environment and recognizing service-related faults rather than equipment-related faults and correlating those to the management system.

The world ordering team of NEC, GE Information Systems, NTT and Tibco demonstrated carrier pre-selection fulfillment on three different interface implementations using CORBA, extensible markup language (XML) and FTP interfaces. The group claims that this will aid carriers when end customers opt to change service providers. The team will add a local number portability feature to the next demo version, expected next spring at TeleManagement World in Nice, France.