KPN TRANSFORMS ITS NETWORK WITH CRAMER'S SYSTEMS HELP

When KPN announced its commitment to a complete network and organizational transformation last year, it sounded like a system integrator's dream. Instead, it turned into a dream job for inventory provider Cramer, which announced its “go live” deployment with KPN this week.

KPN is nearing the end of the first phase of its transformation, which began in its transmission network with technologies such as SDH and DWDM. The Dutch carrier has already replaced three major legacy systems — one of which had been in place since 1975 — and approximately 50 supporting applications.

Cramer's Network Inventory Manager has consolidated information from more than 40,000 KPN locations, including 3 million devices, 4 million cables and 500,000 circuits.

“But since the world doesn't stop at your core network — and we are embarking on new services such as VoIP, Ethernet VPNs and Gigabit Ethernet — we wanted to make sure they were covered by the new network administration systems,” said Wim Helgers, program director of KPN's network information management program.

Thus, Cramer becomes an enterprisewide system with deployments across several business units, including KPN Mobile, ePacity (corporate IP/virtual private network offering), voice over IP and KPN Internet. Last July, Cramer also went live with Eurorings, KPN's optical network, which at one time was jointly owned with Qwest.

Helgers believes that network transformation begins with inventory. “If you don't know what technology you have available and where it is available and you don't have the means in near real-time to activate or deactivate a service, you are going to be in trouble,” he said.

Although he couldn't confirm the reported $1 billion expected savings in operating costs by 2010, Helgers said that through the synchronization of data, the elimination of multiple legacy systems, the automation of processes, better control of its physical inventory and huge job cuts, KPN will save a considerable amount of money.

Cramer also is involved in BT's network transformation, which is more aggressive in its bid to go all-IP, but Cramer Founder and CEO Jon Craton said the projects were similar. “Both companies are trying to remove or limit the constraints that have traditionally affected their ability to move quickly.”

Craton identified four such constraints: complexity of network technology, services being hardwired to that technology, organizational structures built up around that technology and a “system estate” that fragments information throughout the network.

“KPN saw that by applying this solution enterprisewide, they could introduce a much more consistent set of business and technical qualities across the operation,” Craton said.

Consistency also drove KPN's decision to manage the system integration itself rather than hire a third-party integrator, although they did hire people from Cramer and other suppliers on a time-and-material basis.

Larry Goldman, partner and co-founder of OSS Observer, said, “KPN saw Cramer as foundational for transforming their processes and rolling out new services overall, not just one aspect of next-generation services.”

For Craton, the long wait to go public with its deployment was worth it.

“A go-live view of this type is the strongest validation that we are delivering on the promises we have made and the messages we put into the market about what is possible here,” he said.