Cramer responds to emergency call

In the four years since it shipped its first product, Bath, England-based network inventory and provisioning provider Cramer Systems has picked up 30 customers. The company’s latest U.S. customer win came this week from, of all places, the U.K., as its solutions were deployed in mm02’s Airwave dedicated emergency services wireless network.

Cramer’s customer, U.S.-based TRW will use Cramer’s solutions in its Network Management Center (NMC) to provide order management and service activation for Airwave’s network. It will also use Cramer’s inventory system to manage equipment configurations.

With the paucity of contracts in the inventory and provisioning space, Cramer considered this a big win. “There isn’t a lot of business around these days …losing this deal takes the wind out of the sails of our competitors,” said David Canellos, vice president of sales for Cramer.

Airwave will be converting the separate radio systems from 53 law enforcement agencies across England, Scotland and Wales into a single, linked wireless network dedicated to emergency services. Cramer will have to track approximately 3000 radio base stations as well as the links to various switches and emergency control rooms.

“It will be critical for Cramer to ensure the availability of on-demand services,” Canellos said.

mm02 owns four mobile network operators in Europe: BT Cellnet in the UK, Viag Interkom in Germany, Telfort Mobiel and Digifone in Ireland. While these networks are primarily GSM and GPRS, the Airwave network is based on TETRA, the European standard for digital terrestrial trunked radio.

The current contract with TRW and Cramer is for Airwave’s UK network.