Cramer Systems lands in Washington

(Telephony) As if OSS vendors in North America didn’t already have it tough enough, Europe’s leading provider of provisioning solutions, Cramer Systems, has tossed its hat into the $4 billion ring.

The company yesterday launched its North American operations and announced the appointment of Kimber Lewis as president. Lewis was vice president at TeleStrategies and publisher of TelOSSource magazine. Lewis also served as president and COO for the Internet Protocol Data Record Organization (IPDR.) As past vice president of professional services for MetaSolv--now a direct competitor--Lewis should provide Cramer Systems a great deal of insight into their new market.

Cramer enters the market with 26 European customers for its Dimension platform, including BT Cellnet, Belgacom and KPN Telecom.

Asked about the timing of his company’s entry into a struggling market, Cramer CEO Jon Craton said, “We are finding that the investors in the telco market worldwide are losing patience with the ability of telcos to turn the investments the have made in the network infrastructure into revenue at a rate that is quick enough [for them] to continue making investments.”

Craton said his company’s Dimension platform addresses this problem.

“[There is] a direct correlation between the profitability of products and services telcos were offering and the complexity associated with their implementation,” Craton said. “The proposition we make is entirely focused on facilitating that activity by allowing a connection between the demand which is undoubtedly there [and] the supply, which is the investment telcos have made in their networks so far.”

Cramer Systems’ Dimension platform does this by providing a combined inventory and provisioning system, which Craton describes as “inventory-based process automation.”

“There are quite a few players in the inventory space that allow you to document what you purchase rather than manage what you sell,” Craton said. “But inventory and documentation are not, in their own right, attributable to process automation.”

Dimension is based on Cramer’s Active Inventory Platform, which provides physical logical and service models for various vendors and network technologies. These models provide the automated network resource management that evaluates the feasibility of orders based on the availability of facilities and network devices.