Dumping the swivel chair technique: Lumos to unveil new flow-through provisioning

Making it easier for back office personnel to provision new services is the goal of the Telecom Management Server that Lumos Technologies will announce at Supercomm this week.

Traditionally, workers have used multiple proprietary interfaces to provision individual pieces of access and optical equipment using what Conor Dowling, Lumos founder and CEO, calls the "swivel chair" approach.

Lumos has provided software interfaces for network element vendors and is now targeting service providers with its new offering, which aims to provide provisioning for multiple network elements through a Web-based or CORBA interface. On the network element side, the software supports transaction language 1 and simple network management protocol.

"Lumos' position is a little unique in that it comes at it from the equipment side," said Leif Hoglund, director of network management for RHK. "They're not looking at it from the customer viewpoint, but from a pragmatic viewpoint."

A product with the ability to do provisioning on the fly and talk directly to devices should be in great demand, said George Peabody, managing director of telecom research for The Aberdeen Group. "There's so many network devices to talk to, it's a good story. The issue is how well the front office systems integrate with back office systems to talk to their stuff."

The CORBA interface should enable the Lumos offering to support multiple service activation operations support systems, said Hoglund.