Making the grade: AI Metrix builds on Microsoft foundation

If you want to be all that you can be, join the Army. If you want to prove your software is all that it claims to be, join the Department of Defense.

That's what AI Metrix did last year to prove not only the capabilities of its network management software but also the mission-critical reliability of the Windows NT platform on which it runs.

As part of a network management contract awarded to GTE from the Defense Information Systems Agency, AI Metrix supplied the project's "manager of managers," a tool that provided the agency's network operators with a view of their data, voice and video transmission activities. It also lets operators drill down into individual network elements remotely.

"We supported the whole global theater. It got us a lot of visibility," said Peter Oliver, president and chief technology officer of AI Metrix. "As for proving in the Microsoft platform, well, it doesn't get any more mission-critical than the Department of Defense."

Since then, the company has gone on the attack in the telecom market with broadband solutions for service activation, inventory management and service assurance (see figure). AI Metrix recently won a contract with Connect-South to provide service assurance for the provider's DSL-based Internet access network. AI Metrix also has done work for Ameritech Cellular and Comcast.

"We're just a bunch of engineers who started a company," Oliver said. "We didn't know what the hell we were doing business-wise, but we knew that if we built a great product, the rest would take care of itself."

Its flagship product, NeuralStar, is a provisioning and network management platform for broadband and DSL networks. NeuralStar's functionality is commonly offered separately in many best-of-breed solutions, but that approach is expensive, Oliver said. "The cost of maintenance goes up an order of magnitude with every separate [solution]. That's why we say, `Don't integrate - activate,'" he said.

NeuralStar is built on Windows NT, making AI Metrix one of a growing number of operations support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) providers building software on the Windows platform. The company is Windows 2000 compatible and will go through the certification process next year.

AI Metrix has joined 36 other software and networking companies in Microsoft's OSS Working Group. Introduced last year, one item on the group's agenda is to promote the acceptance of extensible markup language (XML) as a standard interface protocol for OSSs. In addition, Microsoft hopes to convince service providers that the Windows 2000 platform is the platform of the future for OSS.

"There is no [market] more motivated to go to Windows 2000 than OSS/BSS because even at this early stage, the reliability data coming back from third parties like The Aberdeen Group really show an outstanding improvement in reliability," said Alan Mitchell, a director in Microsoft's network solutions group.

In March, The Aberdeen Group released a report showing the average availability of the Windows 2000 server system was 99.95% among nine early-adopting Internet companies.

"It has always been true for OSS/BSS that the Windows platform has offered the lowest initial cost of ownership and the fastest time to market," Mitchell said. "It hasn't been true that we also had world-class [reliability and scalability]. But now we do. There has been a lot going on to get us to the point where we are as good as what the gold standard was up until now - Sun platforms."

Despite its success and its relationship with Microsoft, AI Metrix will release a Solaris-based version of NeuralStar this fall. It is aimed at providers that already have Unix-based systems and will be built as different systems altogether. "The software for Solaris is made for Solaris. The software for Microsoft is made for Microsoft," Oliver said.