Defining SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Among the various vendors that have coined, pushed, tested and otherwise floated their definitions of service management through the operations support systems marketplace, it appears as if Syndesis will get a chance to stand up in front of the class and show the proper usage. The Syndesis version is known as “convergent service delivery management.” And it is being used in a sentence with the loudest of exclamation points: SBC IPTV!

With that, two things need to be made clear: The first is that obviously SBC IPTV is not a sentence, but by virtue of its risk and impact, it passes as a declarative statement in this industry. Second, no official from Syndesis nor from SBC Communications has said that the two companies are working together on the implementation of IPTV. However, it would not be going out a limb to assume such is the case given the recent $40 million contract announced by Syndesis with a Tier 1 provider in the U.S., SBC's announcement that Alcatel would be a key player, Syndesis' relationship with Alcatel and the formal recognition that it is working in the equipment-maker's lab in Plano, Texas, and the unchallenged reports elsewhere that this is indeed the case.

Why has there been such restraint on the part of SBC to name certain software suppliers? Perhaps because as Verizon's Shadman Zafar, senior vice president of architecture and eServices, said recently, “In the new generation of services, OSS is the service.”

Carriers have always tried to keep software decisions close to their vest; perhaps now they have good reason.

Verizon isn't too far behind SBC with its own rollout, so others will soon get their chance to stand before the class. And it is more important than ever that they get the answers right.

“If IPTV takes too long [to get implemented], it may become irrelevant as something else gets invented,” Zafar said.

Although SBC is the big showcase everyone is watching, Syndesis has already begun deploying its service delivery management (SDM) solution for IPTV at Telus in Canada. However, each company has a slightly different twist with how they want to implement technology around their service deployment, said Chris Swan, senior vice president of sales, marketing and alliances at Syndesis.

The Syndesis Convergent SDM solution supports the following functions: service fulfillment, which encompasses service design, resource assignment and activation; data integrity management across all operations and business support systems; service and resource optimization; service verification, configuration management and policy management.

On paper, that pretty much covers the requirements for delivery of new services, but as Sanjay Mewada, vice president at Yankee Group, said, “It's like riding the tail of a comet … they are dealing with stuff where the carriers don't yet know how it is going to work.”

Mewada said a lot of things must happen for IPTV to be successful and a bunch of people must work together to solve it.

Mark Nicholson, chief technology officer at Syndesis, said that IPTV and other triple-play deployments will truly signal the start of the blending of telecom OSS and IT.

“The worlds will have to come together in a synergistic fashion,” Nicholson said. “You can't have these guys stepping on each other. They have to work together to solve end-to-end problems.”

Within these groups are two subgroups that Nicholson said have historically been, if not opposed to one another, at the very least operating far too independently: the fulfillment group and the assurance group.

“This always causes issues to become someone else's problem, which may have worked for the last 20 years but now you can't just push services out to the network,” Nicholson said. “You have to constantly monitor how that service is configured in the network, what else has been configured in the network since your service was put in and what impact those services are having on each other.”

The trick, according to Adam Boone, vice president of strategic marketing for Syndesis, is to make the fulfillment process the center of the process flow and make the intelligence necessary to manage services flow from there out to other processes and elements in the network.

“There's no more ‘fulfill and forget’ or ‘provision and pray,’” said Boone, who is the former marketing director for CoManage, the company Syndesis acquired earlier this year and made its core discovery and reconciliation engine for data integrity management.

This strategy of centering the intelligence on the fulfillment process rather than in some other OSS process was probably key to Syndesis winning its first two SDM contracts for IPTV and related triple-play services, but it doesn't guarantee the company will win the day with other carriers.

“Service providers make a choice early on how they want to approach something,” said Larry Goldman, co-founder and analyst for OSS Observer. “While Syndesis has an enormous amount of intelligence and control of the provisioning process built into their NetProvision product, that means a service provider has to be wiling to say that's where it wants the intelligence to be. Others see the intelligence in order management or somewhere else like inventory. So it's a philosophical choice.”

Wherever vendors decide to emphasize the necessary intelligence and functionality, there are certain things an SDM solution must do. Obviously, it must allow the introduction of new services. But more important, it must meet the evolving expectations of customers living in what it calls a “clicker culture,” which are much higher than carriers have been used to when it comes to how a service performs in simplicity, personalization, cost and quality.

Boone said Syndesis' solution addresses this through the continuous verification of services — their configurations and the configurations of surrounding services and network elements. This is data integrity. Syndesis also addresses these requirements by making its solutions — and in turn the network — application and service aware.

Syndesis uses a combination of its NetProvision, TrueSource and NetOptimizer product portfolios, which it has aligned with Alcatel's triple-play OSS/business support system (BSS) solution and integrated with other Alcatel partners such as Amdocs, BEA Systems, Cramer and Micromuse, to support various aspects of delivery management for IP-related services.

Janet Davidson, chief strategy officer for Lucent Technologies, said that IPTV is not yet a sure winner. She said customers will come to it, but that the industry has to help them. It can do this, she said, by building a network that is service-aware.

“Next-generation systems need to be aware of what consumers are doing and be aware of all their quality of service requirements,” Davidson said.

In order to do that, carriers, with the help of their vendors, must be able to look at many more metrics and elements than they have historically, including the customer premises.

“If a customer takes an IPTV bundle and they have a problem, think of all the things that could cause that,” she said. “We will have to depend on [the customer] to [help us] make it easier.”

The only way to know what may have gone wrong with a service, Nicholson said, is to know the network and the individual services as they truly are at all times, versus how they are supposed to be.

“That means we have to know that when the initial service configuration is done and we activate the service and that the customer is happy, that in three months it will still be that way,” Nicholson said.

That's where service delivery becomes service delivery management, and that's the difference between delivering an old telco service and one such as telco TV.

All this is not to say that convergent service delivery management is all about IPTV. That service will merely be the most visible and important test of the concept. Convergent SDM, if successful, should be even more beneficial to service providers from a cost perspective because like the IP multimedia subsystem architecture, it can be used for multiple services on multiple networks.

“If a carrier is going to make an OSS investment for IPTV, theoretically you should be able to use the same systems for other high-speed data services,” said Patrick Kelly, co-founder and partner at OSS Observer.

However, that's easier said than done, he said. “It gets dicey when you look at services like VoIP.”

So far, service delivery hasn't registered as a market big enough for OSS Observer to track, roughly $50 million per year in total. However, some of the individual elements of service management will account for the biggest growth in OSS over the next few years.

Kelly said in a report out just last week on global OSS spending through 2010 that service quality management, multi-service activation, inventory and real-time charging will be high-growth areas.

He also said that when it comes to complex high-speed data services, including IPTV, that investment in OSS has to be made earlier than mass-market adoption.

Given the aggressive timelines for deployment and customer acquisition by SBC and others, OSS investment better start soon. In the first quarter of this year, SBC said its goal was to reach 19 million homes with as much as 40 Mb/s within three years.

One way or another, a year or two into SBC's IPTV deployment, the industry should either have a pretty good grasp on the true meaning of convergent service delivery management or be looking for a new interpreter.

ALCATEL PROVIDES WARP DRIVE FOR PROJECT LIGHTSPEED

SBC's Project Lightspeed is progressing at an impressive pace, thanks in part to Alcatel and its partners.

After completing successful technical field trials with SBC employees in San Antonio, Texas, and in conjunction with TeleManagement World in nearby Dallas last month, Alcatel opened the doors to its Plano-based Operations Support Systems Integration Laboratory and gave select customers and analysts a peek at a working solution and the partners providing it.

Alcatel's solution highlighted the integration of applications from BEA Systems, Cramer, Micromuse and Syndesis with its own access and aggregation devices, video servers and Microsoft's IPTV Edition software platform. Alcatel also is working with companies such as Amdocs for billing, Motive for self-care and 2Wire, with which it has taken a 25% stake, for residential gateways.

“We have created a mock house with everything from lighting to interference from the microwave [oven.] It sounds silly, but you don't know how these configurations will work until you do something like this,” said Johanne Mayer, director of market positioning for Alcatel.

Alcatel's relationship with Syndesis dates back to 1994 when a division of Alcatel, which was then Newbridge Networks, began working with Syndesis as an activation tool.

“In the past, all you had to activate was the infrastructure, but now that you are adding content and applications that are real time, it's all different,” Mayer said. “It takes a real service delivery platform that understands location, presences, status, availability, preferences and all these little real-time apps that come along.”

The demo Alcatel put together with its partners shows how pre-integrated OSS/BSS solutions work together to ensure fast and accurate delivery and quality of triple-play services. Within Alcatel's end-to-end IPTV solution, the companies captured premium content from satellite antennas and took it through an IP-routed and -switched network with access to the customer premises via very high-speed DSL or fiber-to-the-premises terminating on a residential gateway.

“It's not just smoke and mirrors anymore. You can see work actually getting done,” said Syndesis' Chris Swan.

The biggest challenge with integrating so many applications and interfaces to deliver real-time services, said Don Gibson, chief technology officer for Cramer, is that the effort must stay hidden. “Customers want simplicity, but at the heart of the issue is that this truly is complex.”
— Tim McElligott