Integrating the back room

Although a number of both custom-developed and off-the-shelf software systems have emerged to drive carriers' back-office operations, there is still a shortage of software tools and services to integrate these systems. But as competition in the local loop begins to intensify, smooth interaction between front- and back-office operations is expected to contribute to marketplace differentiation.

Piscataway, N.J.-based Networkprograms LLC, a privately owned integrator of business and operations support systems (OSSs), recently unveiled an offering dubbed The New Platform that company officials say will help manage the complexity of integrating back-office functions.

TNP is an integrated suite of component-based application frameworks and underlying technologies that supports development, customization and deployment of OSSs. Analysts believe such offerings will become increasingly important to carriers as the marketplace become more competitive.

TNP falls into a new middleware category called application internetworking software, said Mike Cristinziano, vice president of network software research at the investment firm Gerard, Klauer & Mattison.

This new category of network computing infrastructure allows clients to develop a unified view of all account and product information by incorporating data from off-the-shelf products, legacy systems and wholesale providers' systems in a fully integrated object model.

"This can give a carrier a competitive advantage because it allows them to automate functions that are often handled manually today," said Cristinziano

TNP will help communications providers improve their time-to-market for new services and let them make quick adjustments to changing market conditions, according to Rick Mace, president and CEO of NPL.

NPL is competing in a marketplace dominated by the telecom version of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView. But TNP's ability to scale and handle issues that are specific to telecom operations could give it an edge over competing platforms, Cristinziano said.

Moreover, Cristinziano pointed out that NPL was founded by a group of Bell Labs and Bellcore personnel who were largely responsible for the design and architecture of existing communications OSSs used by today's incumbent carriers.

"The single toughest issue in developing an OSS is having the domain expertise," said Cristinziano. NPL executives "realized that there was an opportunity [with the new competitive carriers], and they took their core development environment and productized it."

Consequently, NPL is focusing its early marketing activities on competitive local exchange carriers. According to company officials, most incumbent carriers already have made significant investments in internally developed systems integration solutions.

Moreover, typical incumbent carriers' sales cycles are much longer than those of CLECs.

"CLECs are very anxious to deploy new systems to help their operations," said Bruno Codispoti, NPL's vice president of corporate development. "They are acquiring customers at a very rapid pace, and their operations support systems are nowhere near where they need to be to manage the volume of business that they are getting."

Now in beta testing, TNP will be commercially deployed for the first time this July. The unnamed CLEC deploying the software is a reseller of local service and is using TNP to acquire customers from the existing incumbent LEC in the region.

"Orders are placed via an [electronic data interchange] interface to the [incumbent LEC] for whatever services are requested by a particular client," said Codispoti.

GST PICKS OSS VENDOR GST Telecommunications has selected Quintessent Communications to provide software for interconnection. The QConnect package allows GST to communicate with incumbent carriers' operations support systems and automates billing, ordering and pre-ordering.

VPN SOFTWARE EXPANDS Compatible Systems Corp. has added Windows NT, Linux and Macintosh operating system client software to its IntraPort VPN access servers. The server also includes IPSec-compliant tunneling for TCP/IP networks and client support for two types of encryption.