The great seeping software takeover

In the weeks before Supercomm, Microsoft's first appearance at the show was being treated with a heavy dose of skepticism. And there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

Microsoft has spent much of its own breath and ink over the last few years talking about how it was targeting the public network as a significant market. Its endeavors, however, always fell short of reality because it was so busy trying to jump over the market's wall that it never tried to walk in through the gate. Microsoft has been a household name everywhere else - just not in public network telecommunications.

At this year's Supercomm, Microsoft finally walked through that gate and brought with it a bounty of software solutions targeted squarely at specific public network needs.

Its entry into the market with a more fully realized strategy than before coincides with the growth of public network software in general. All over the industry, software advancements are creating a new look for operations support systems (OSSs), driving the development of innovative enhanced services and raising the bar for managing complex networks.

Operations support systems In many ways, the public network industry is racing against time to re-engineer and better integrate the various elements of carrier OSSs. Incumbent carriers must struggle with opening up their OSS for access by competitors at the same time they are trying to streamline system performance for important applications such as service ordering and provisioning. Some of the new OSS-related solutions at Supercomm '97 reflected the turbulent times.

The service ordering and provisioning process has been one of the OSS areas most under renovation. Hungry competitors have noted how long it sometimes takes telcos to process orders and activate services, and they have zeroed in on this weakness as one of their points of differentiation. That weakness has given birth to new solutions - some of which were seen at Supercomm - that can help both new and existing carriers revolutionize the ordering and provisioning process.

Applied Digital Access introduced .Provisioner 1.2, specifically targeted at automating the circuit and node provisioning function for networks with digital cross-connect systems (DCSs) and add/drop multiplexers. It supports multivendor DCSs, multiplexers and other transport elements, and it complies with the Telecommunications Management Network standards framework.

MCI and BC Telecom are among the first carriers that are set to deploy .Provisioner, which will be generally available this summer, said Steven Murphy, vice president of sales and marketing at Applied Digital Access. The San Diego company previously has been known for its Sectionalizer performance management solution, and .Provisioner is its new entry in OSS, said Murphy.

Four-year-old MetaSolv Software announced the third release of its Telecom Business Solution software. TBS 3.0 adds to the product's existing Sonet circuit provisioning capabilities with copper/fiber management, remote testing and repetitive task processing for handling large-scale orders.

MetaSolv is broadening its architecture more into the plant management and service ordering realms as carriers are requiring fuller integration of these functions with actual circuit provisioning, said Kim Klieger, senior product manager at MetaSolv.

Architel, based in Toronto, chimed in with the new release of its Automated Service Activation Program (ASAP). ASAP 4.1 will be available next month. The latest release of the service activation engine will include the ASAP Information Management System (AIMS) user interface. AIMS supports integrated capabilities for order entry, provisioning management and service monitoring.

Siemens Stromberg-Carlson also demonstrated its take on flow-through provisioning at the show. ServiceCoordinator supports provisioning for many kinds of services by identifying the connectivity required for each service and dividing the service functions among specific network element pools.

Better integration is probably this year's hot button for OSS. Ordering interfaces between competing carriers' networks is a particularly thorny area, especially as the need to obtain such interfaces quickly is increasing with deregulation.

Bellcore announced its answer to the problem - a network channel/network channel interface decoder software package that simplifies the process of selecting the correct codes for ordering network interfaces. A typical local exchange carrier might need to process these codes more than 1000 times in a single month to support the needs of another network operator or reseller.

With its pending sale to Science Applications International Corp., Bellcore seems to be targeting OSS applications as one of the chief areas for its vaunted commercialization.

Bellcore announced a partnership with Sun Microsystems, under which the agency will develop OSS solutions to operate on Sun's computing platforms. The first joint effort between the companies focuses on the reconfiguration of Bellcore's NetPilot OSS gateway solution, which also supports CCS network administration and local number portability, and its DCOS-2000 traffic data collection software. The solutions are being modified to operate jointly on a single 64-microprocessor Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 server.

"This will support common OSS interfacing between carriers," said Doug Ehrenreich, director of global telecommunications and cable market development at Sun.

Another company that is focused on integration at the OSS level is Accugraph, of El Paso, Texas. The company demonstrated its new Engineering, Capacity and Operations Solution (ECOS). First announced earlier this year at Wireless '97, ECOS allows network administrators and engineers to create electronic network models that support records for network equipment and circuit connections. The configurable models can help users better plan their increasingly complex networks. ECOS also interfaces with a wide variety of network surveillance solutions.

The increasing integration of OSS processes reflects the trend toward a more distributed model for OSS. The purpose is to demystify the OSS environment in part for the new pack of carriers and resellers that need to interface with it, but also so that carriers can access their own OSS information more quickly to better formulate proactive service strategies.

Accessing and analyzing such information has become another potentially lucrative OSS segment for vendors.

IBM demonstrated its new DecisionEdge, a decision support system (DSS) aimed at helping carrier project managers discover and analyze the sometimes not-so-obvious trends in service usage, customer behavior and product acceptance. DecisionEdge, co-developed with data warehousing company BSG, will be generally available in September.

DecisionEdge differs from other DSSs by completely integrating traditional warehousing with new data discovery and analysis technologies, said Vince Jones, marketing operations executive for IBM Global Business Intelligence Solutions. This integration allows quicker implementation in a legacy carrier environment, with deployment taking three to four months, compared with one year for other solutions, he said.

More fluid OSS integration will help networks support the bundle of enhanced services and advanced functions that increasingly competitive carriers wil need to support. At the show, Tekelec demonstrated its long-standing Eagle signal transfer point (STP) product, just as STPs are being positioned as one of the network elements for handling number portability inquires. Service control points (SCPs) are another portability option, and Tandem Computer discussed how its SCP could support wireless portability.

Network management While OSS integration is happening on an elemental level, it is also happening in a more general sense. OSS functions are becoming more integrated with management and monitoring functions across the network to create more seamless end-to-end network management.

MetaSolv demonstrated this trend in its recent partnership with Objective Systems Integrators and Kenan Systems to provide an integrated circuit provisioning/management/billing architecture. Both MetaSolv and OSI discussed the partnership at Supercomm and how it will provide a competitive carrier, Electric Lightwave Inc., with a streamlined approach to maintaining its services.

Other new carriers, such as small Internet service providers, also are in a rush to deploy integrated solutions before the well-established incumbent carriers do the same.

To this end, Hewlett-Packard announced a partnership with Portal Information Network to offer Portal's popular Infranet customer and billing management system for the Internet on HP's Unix platforms. CompuServe will be the joint venture's first customer.

Furthering the integration concept, Applied Innovation, the Dublin, Ohio, company that focuses on interoperability between network elements and OSSs, took part in the nine-vendor Sonet interoperability demonstration on the show floor.

The AISwitch and AI 2524 Router - a Cisco router repackaged as an AISwitch interface module - provide a backplane port for communication between Sonet network elements and higher level OSSs and network management engines to facilitate end-to-end management of multivendor Sonet networks.

Northern Telecom also sees seamless, integrated networkwide management as a priority, launching its Integrated Network Management portfolio at Supercomm. The INM portfolio seeks to establish an open architecture framework for managing multivendor networks.

The industry is starting to have a more positive attitude about supporting multivendor networks, said Steve Nicolle, assistant vice president and general manager of Nortel INM. It is obvious that carriers want to deploy multiple vendors, and the vendor community, by necessity, must build open architectures supported by well-integrated management solutions.

"We are starting to see some healthy vendor cooperation, and that cooperation has to happen now because we are entering the second phase of network Sonet deployment. Second vendors are being chosen, and the industry must be able to manage the interoperability," said Nicolle.

Part of INM's mission is to address the integration of once island-like element management systems (EMSs) into a broader, more effective network management landscape. It can accomplish this by enhancing its own INM network manager and network resource manager with element management layer software and toolkits from Ireland's Euristix.

Euristix made its first appearance at Supercomm, displaying the Raceman EMSX and IQ3 solutions for integrated management. The Irish company, also working with Tellabs on a similar project, is fast becoming a popular partner for EMS integration projects, and its booth attracted heavy attention from both carriers and vendors.

Supercomm provided a venue for updates of existing partnerships as well. DSET, of Bridgewater, N.J., and France's Marben, both vendors supporting the Telecommunications Management Network framework, launched a co-marketing partnership last fall but arrived at Supercomm with news that DSET has acquired Marben outright. The merged company likely can be a global force in TMN.

Marben's Open Systems Interoperability protocol stack is complementary with DSET's TMN toolkit, and the products together can more broadly answer carriers' Sonet network management needs.

Another existing TMN partnership, between Microsoft and Vertel, bore its first fruit at Supercomm, as the companies announced TMN compliance for Microsoft's Windows NT server, the result of NT's integration with Vertel's Powercats TMN platform.

TMN compliance likely will enhance NT's chances of becoming a widely deployed server platform in public networks, said Bill Anderson, director of telecom industry marketing at Microsoft.

The list of carriers that desire TMN does not end with telcos, said Noel Goggin, vice president of product management at Vertel.

Another benefactor of that demand is Bull Integrated Systems Management, part of the Western hemisphere arm of France's Groupe Bull. Bull demonstrated its ISM TMN Master product and disclosed its strategy to become one of the top three management software suppliers by 2000.

The company also discussed recent partnerships and co-marketing agreements with companies such as Cabletron's OASys Group, Tandem Computer and Syseca.

Ongoing technology advancement and blooming partnerships are signs that TMN is evolving from a once questionable technology hurdle to a well-integrated, widely adopted network standard.

The latest part of the network that TMN is calling home is network synchronization. Two of the leading synchronization vendors announced TMN compliance for their products.

Vertel and Datum-Austron partnered to integrate Vertel's Powercats TMN software with Austron's Netsync product family of primary reference sources, receivers, timing signal generators and other solutions.

"We recognized a year ago that management integration was the key for timing products. A synchronization company's chance of future success without it will be slim to none," said Austron President Jack Rice. "But taking TMN down to the clock level hasn't been cost-effective, and because our carrier customers didn't know what they wanted, we were dealing with [gelatin]. We needed some experienced help.

Austron looked for a TMN partner for 10 months before hooking up with Vertel, Rice said. The integrated products are available now.

Telecom Solutions also introduced a new TMN-integrated synchronization solution called the Timescan/NMS. "Synchronization today is at the element level, but new synchronization applications will reach up through the service layer of the TMN triangle," said Phil Mann, director of synchronization products at Telecom Solutions.

An eye on integration Maintaining a whole network view pretty much sums up the evolving role of software in the public network. Whether for OSS functionality, services support or network management, the industry is starting and must continue to put software developers to task to deliver more seamless systems integration across the whole network.

The continued success of existing carriers and any chance for the success of new players, depends on the degree of operational efficiency they can attain, the flexibility and quickness with which they can deliver new services, and the level of reliability they can consistently manage.

The number of software exhibitors has increased tremendously in direct proportion to growing industry reliance on their solutions, and this will continue to happen.

Software is seeping into the public network in increasing amounts, and its takeover of network functions is not that of a software giant imposing its view of the world, but that of an industry trying to answer real and desperate needs.