HP, Vertel bolt out of shared gate

Following their partnership announced just six weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard and Vertel announced four jointly developed Telecommunications Management Network products at last week's Telemanagement World conference and expo in Montreal.

The products, including TMN Designer, TMN Manager, TMN Agent and TMN Proxy Developer, stem from the integration of the TMN platform capabilities on HP's OpenView Telecom distributed management solution and Vertel's TMN applications development strengths. Vertel President and Chief Executive Officer Bruce Brown said the two companies had been working together for nearly a year.

Among these products, TMN Designer lets developers validate information models for TMN development, while TMN Manager and TMN Agent automate both sides of TMN applications development. The proxy piece allows translation of Transaction Language 1 messages to common management information protocol operations.

"Having very complete tool sets will help push TMN adoption," said Todd Goldman, product marketing manager of OpenView Telecom at HP.

An earlier round of TMN-driven partnerships within the last two years focused on international cross-marketing opportunities, but some of these arrangements fell by the wayside, partly because the vendors overestimated the TMN market's maturity. However, product development agreements aimed at extending comprehensive solutions may set a more suitable model. "We made a conscious decision to do something more than a cross-marketing agreement. This makes sense in terms of product development," said Scott Marshall, product manager of OpenView Telecom at HP.

"We're planning a future road map for other suites of products. This is only the first suite," said Noel Goggin, manager of product management at Vertel.