MetaSolv broadens product portfolio

MetaSolv went on offense this week with three new products developed in-house that compliment its existing inventory and activation solutions.

The company, which turned in a solid first-quarter earnings report last week, introduced a new configuration management product, a subscriber and service management product and Time-to-Market OSS, a set of tools for introducing and incubating--or testing--new services and that leverage MetaSolv's Provisioning 5 solution.

The MetaSolv Configuration Management supports proactive configuration, service archiving and version maintenance for multi-vendor networks. It works in conjunction with the company's activation product and "allows us to extend out activation leadership into the area of configuration management," said Curtis Holmes, CEO of MetaSolv.

The solution provides real-time capabilities for determining not only what the network configuration is and was, but also what it should be going forward. Few vendors bring that capability to the table, Holmes said.

Today's networks are so muddled with multi-vendor flavors of overlapping technologies, such as 2G and 3G, that carriers are crying out for more integrated operations support systems (OSS), said Dan Baker, research director of the OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase of Dittberner Associates in a statement.

Other Configuration Manager capabilities include network discovery, which captures network element information and organizes network elements into networks and sub-networks; configuration auditing and operators to invoke automated configuration compliance auditing across the network; and configuration activation, which provides configuration templates for consistent configuration implementations based on pre-defined network engineering guidelines.

The product will be generally available in the third quarter and has been sold to a Tier 1, European service provider.

"And it's not BT," Holmes said. Much of MetaSolv's success in Europe so far has been in the U.K. However, Holmes said last week that international markets such as the U.K. and Asia will be instrumental in reaching double-digit revenue growth this year.

MetaSolv also introduced its Subscriber and Service Management product this week. It provides a unified view of customers across domains to efficiently manage both subscribers and services. This one works with MetaSolv's and other inventory systems to leverage existing OSS investment.

It comes with a specification catalog that defines subscribers, products, services, configurations and rules; a subscriber and service repository of managed or federated subscriber, product, services and customer data; an integration framework for promoting interoperability and collaboration with complementary OSS/BSS components. It is using a service-oriented architecture and leverages the TeleManagement Forum Shared Information Data model (SID) framework and OSS through Java (OSS/J).

Holmes said this product was the first in the last five years developed at MetaSolv entirely from scratch. "We feel very good about it. You can imagine the development team is pretty excited, too, to finally develop a new product after years of re-architecting and customizing existing products," he said.

This product will be generally available in June 2006. It is currently being deployed by China Telecom.

MetaSolv's third new innovation is Time-to-Market OSS. Using the company's Provisioning 5 solution, it provides process and automation tools for introducing and testing new services, such as: coordinating people, systems and activities through a single Web interface, pre-packaged processes for next-generation services, including IPTV; leveraging existing systems and data sources and tracking and supporting multiple iterations of provisioning processes.