Agilent brings service fulfillment to optical

LAS VEGAS-- Building on its modular OSS approach as well as its partnerships for delivering it, Agilent Technologies introduced its OSS Fulfillment Optical family of products today at TeleManagement World here and announced the full integration of Cramer Systems’ inventory and provisioning software.

Agilent’s new solution integrates workflow, inventory and activation for overall provisioning of optical networks including SONET, SDH and TDM technologies.

The modular architecture Agilent has been building since it acquired OSI last year and made its bid to be a leader in OSS service fulfillment has been designed to include pre-integrated third-party solutions such as Cramer's.

“OSS is an area of fundamental growth for our company,” said Giorgio Dina, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s OSS business unit. “Acquiring OSI has been a fundamental piece of our strategy in becoming the number one supplier of OSS.”

Other third-party integration with Agilent’s OSS platform includes Amdocs’ billing solutions, Tibco enterprise adapters and Cerebrus fraud management.

Bruno Berti, product manager for service fulfillment at Agilent, who came over from OSI, said an open, modular strategy has allowed the combined companies to meet the time-to-market demands its customers have been screaming for.

“Customers want a return on investment in less than six months, and the only way we can do that is to be up and running in a matter of weeks rather than giving them just a framework,” he said.

There are three components to Agilent’s fulfillment solution. The workflow manager controls workforce and order management and other process flows within the provisioning process. The provisioning and inventory manager, which comes from Cramer, also manages service configuration. The third piece is Agilent’s activation manager. It handles network element configuration and synchronization of the inventory.

The element configuration, also known as device activation, is designed to reduce costs by reducing the need for manual configuration. “It means not needing great specialist to understand all the new technologies. It provides information that can be quickly digested to accelerate decisions and increase the productivity of the customer,” Dina said.