Come on in: Lucent to integrate in-house OSS solutions

Lucent Technologies this week will announce a plan to integrate its various in-house, acquired and partnership solutions into a single operations and business support system architecture.

Lucent's Kenan OSS and BSS solutions suite will target emerging competitive carriers by offering an end-to-end solution with a pay-as-you-grow price plan. The new OSS/BSS will be a pre-integrated modular solution.

The architecture will have six components, all owned by Lucent except for Granite Systems' Xpercom inventory management solution. Lucent has a reseller agreement with Granite to distribute Xpercom.

"We believe it is a future-proofed solution in that we are increasing functionality of all the components over time through our development organization and our product-centric model," said Alison Poett, industry marketing manager for Lucent's software products group.

The solution's foundation will be the newest release of Arbor/OM, the order entry and workflow management module of the Kenan product line. The release will be available in September.

Arbor/OM also will have a configurable user interface that includes trouble ticketing, work force management and connections into Xpercom and ConnectVU, another OSS module.

ConnectVU will activate circuit-switched elements and will handle switch translations. Later this year, Lucent will integrate its Navis suite of service and network management applications with Arbor/OM to include support for voice-over-IP and DSL deployments.

Arbor/BP will handle the converged billing function, supporting usage-based rating plans and enabling service bundling. Lucent's Billdats data manager will capture and filter data from various multivendor network elements, reformat it and send it to the billing system.

"This isn't just a Lucent-exclusive solution. It is aimed at all companies with any type of network elements in place," Poett said.

The Kenan OSS/BSS suite gives emerging carriers another option for OSS implementation.

Service providers have three options for managing their networks, said Larry Goldman, senior analyst for RHK. They can choose not to integrate their systems, using the work force to make things work together; they can pick a group of point solutions and hire consultants to manage the implementation and integration; or they can ask their most significant equipment vendor to make it all work.

"There are some services providers interested in their major equipment supplier providing them with integrated OSS solutions that help them offer new services faster," Goldman said. "Some would reject this mode out of hand. They don't want to be tied to their equipment vendor for this."

Lucent's strategy is customer driven, Poett said. "What we have learned over the last several years in focusing on the competitive space is for companies just starting out, they are looking to get as many pieces of the pie from one vendor that they possibly can."

If that's true, the field is getting crowded. "Nortel, Cisco, Lucent and Alcatel have all made acquisitions and partnerships to provide a more complete OSS solution," Goldman said. "There is a trend toward major equipment vendors trying to offer a greater integration of their different systems."

There is also a growing interest in hosted OSS models.

Lucent believes a few characteristics distinguish its OSS system. "There are a lot of companies in the OSS space that are teaming with billing vendors," Poett said. "In some of those partnerships, they really are no more than partnerships."

The vendor also expects to eliminate some synchronization issues by using only one product catalog that all systems access. Brand recognition of Lucent components and the individual components also goes a long way, Poett said.

Lucent plans to offer a long-term strategy. By the fourth quarter, it hopes to add options for switch activation with connections into ConnectVU and to integrate Navis for activating data switches, routers and DSL access multiplexers.

"We believe there is a life cycle to these components and, while we may not do business with some of these companies now, we will likely see them later, " Poett said.