VPI automates industry’s oldest profession

Before there were OSSs, long before software developers created for themselves a lawyer-like employment niche of necessary evil, there were engineers. They planned and plotted and graphed and charted the erlangs and the repeaters and the rings and redundancy. They estimated the A-links, the D-channels, and the Z-side terminations. And they toiled in a world of manual processes long into the age of flow through provisioning and order management--the darlings of the OSS and the wells into which all development money was poured. Engineers and planners were left to their own devices.

Help arrived last week as automation and flow-through came to the planning and engineering departments through the efforts of Holmdel, NJ-based VPI Systems and Telcordia Technologies.

The two companies have combined technologies to create and deliver a suite of planning and engineering tools that allow information to flow from one group’s system to the other while providing access to the people who really matter--the financiers.

The Telcordia Access Planner and Telcordia Network Engineer, part of the company’s network design and inventory suite, will now be offered with OEM solutions from VPI that not only coordinate the flow of data, but provide market demand and forecast data that helps designers and planners stay focused on the economics of their build plans.

“Every question is an economic question, and if you make a mistake in planning [with the economics], you could find yourself out of business,” said Kay Iversen, CEO at VPI.

The combination of Telcordia’s engineering tools and his company’s investment planning solutions creates what Iversen calls a “demand driven network deployment.” It provides a more enticing return on investment than previous solutions by tying network growth to market forecasts and by reducing the amount of errors that typically occur when manually translating planning data into actual engineering designs, Iversen said.

“It’s really about getting efficient and grounding the planning process in reality,” said Elizabeth Parson-Morgan, vice president of marketing communications at VPI.

Telcordia’s Network Engineer is part of the company’s overall OSS platform. It helps service providers design both inside and outside plant for fiber, copper and coaxial networks. The software also creates work orders and related reporting, plots facility maps and provides connectivity management.

“We are finally linking all these things together so that, when the planning department wants to do an augmentation of the network, they can pull data straight from engineering and keep the data clean all the way through from planning to engineering to provisioning,” said Matt Herdlein, director of network design and supply-chain management at Telcordia.

That includes pulling together Telcordia’s Access Planner, a tool for creating blueprints that combines geomarketing data and financial analysis.

“Access Planner allows us to create the technology and the services for that technology and understand what the requirements would be on the network and the actual cost,” Leonard said.