The future of fulfillment: Ceon paves the OSS way for converged services

After years of quiet R&D, a 17-year-old operations support system developer has emerged with a new name, new management and a new approach to service provisioning and fulfillment for telecom service providers.

FirsTel Systems has a history of designing operations and management systems for large carriers, primarily for legacy service such as Centrex. Now called Ceon, the revamped software developer is focusing on providing an integrated order management, service creation, service fulfillment and provisioning method for the kinds of integrated applications it believes service providers now require.

"We've taken the last three years and developed a carrier-class solution that can move a carrier into e-business," said Tim Fritzley, CEO of Ceon. Fritzley heads an executive team recruited from Sun Microsystems, GTE and TCSI, which will join the existing R&D team from FirsTel.

Ceon's service fulfillment application, called It's On, is centered on the company's NetExpress Federation Server. Fritzley described Ceon's strategy as "surround and migrate" because it integrates carriers' existing OSS elements to allow IP data, voice and video services to be provisioned and delivered.

"We've developed a technology that allows us to model these services and treat them as a single transaction to the consumer," Fritzley said. "You want to allow a customer to access you any way he wants to and be able to select and turn on and off any one of a variety of services."

Maintaining service brand recognition in that process is another important component to Ceon's approach, Fritzley said. "How you brand and interact with the consumer is going to become the most critical piece of provisioning," he said. "We really become the gateway into customer relationship management."

Ceon's executive prowess and its technical experience - coupled with the software developer's focus on equipping OSSs specifically for the delivery of new services - could make the company a formidable opponent to the OSS establishment, said Leif Hoglund, director of network management market research at RHK.

"They've built an engineering team that's used to delivering very complicated services, and there are really no platforms out there that enable you to do that," Hoglund said. Ceon will be able to handle more complex services and scale up to RBOC-sized companies, he said, whereas existing OSS developers may not be capable of that level of scalability and service flexibility.

"They're one of the only ones talking about delivering the kinds of services everybody talks about," Hoglund said. "There's a provisioning market that Telcordia kind of owns, but there's an emerging market of complex services that customers want to have control of."