Ai Metrix enhances inventory management

Ai Metrix released version 2 of its NetAuditor network inventory management product yesterday, adding enhanced automated network auditing and reconciliation.

With NetAuditor, customers with existing networks can model and build network inventory faster and start-ups can stage and build network inventories before creating a network.

“You can eliminate all this overhead from errored work orders that are resulting because of inconsistencies between the data base and the actual network,” said Anthony Semiao, product manager for NetAuditor at Ai Metrix, an operations support system and business support system provider. “That’s something that we bring to the table that our competition doesn’t. Or at least that we haven’t seen yet from the competition.”

The NetAuditor communicates directly with network elements, sharing inventory data on a real-time basis with back-office systems and external trading partners. “Our inventory is alive,” Semiao said. “When you put something in our database, we can give you the technology and the mechanisms to actually speak to the networks and say that what you have in the database is really what’s in the network.”

NetAuditor is used in conjunction with the NeuralStar suite of network management applications, which run on a Windows NT system. It sits on top of the NeuralStar framework and uses all the framework components to communicate with the device over multiple protocols.

The NeuralStar suite is a flow-through provisioning and network management software product for next generation broadband and DSL networks. It has a common database, which means the reconciled, real-time network inventory data is shared with the network provisioning and activation system--the NetActivator—and the service assurance system—the NetAdvisor.

The NetAuditor brings customers--such as Greenfield competitive local exchange carriers, small ISPs and carriers--an out-of-the-box functionality that they don’t have to wait for, Semiao said. “NetAuditor, the framework support, has enough of a generic base that we can put it in and it works for 85% of the customer needs,” he said. The other 15% is customized to fit customers’ needs.