MWA: NetCracker gets high in Dallas

DALLAS--High definition and high bandwidth are new areas of focus for NetCracker Technology as the OSS provider announced new solutions for both from the TM Forum’s Management World Americas this week.

NetCracker, a provider of fulfillment and provisioning solutions for converged network and IT infrastructures, followed up on last year’s new platform release, which created a foundation for the convergence of the network and IT domains, with a new release that Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy of NetCracker, said makes that foundation real.

The company is offering what it calls out-of-the-box wireline and wireless infrastructure connectivity for high-definition services. These are services that require high bandwidth, strict QoS, and low latency.

“If you use a single platform to manage both the network and IT domains, clearly it would be a significant advantage,” Mewada said.

Telus Chief Information Officer Kevin Salvadori said NetCracker is helping to transform its OSS. He said Telus chose to do business with NetCracker because, “They had as strong a vision of converged services as we did, and they supported that with a flexible, open architecture.”

NetCracker’s new capabilities will enable service providers to fulfill and provision high-definition and high-bandwidth services over WiMAX, VDSL2, VDSL2+, metro Ethernet and passive optical networking (PON) infrastructures. They also include new IP address and telephone number management features that make these designations more that just customer identifiers.

NetCracker also will be supporting the migration to IPv6 with a solution that manages IPv4 and IPv6 address pools in parallel as well as the transition from IPv4 to IPv6; fixed, mobile, and voice-over-IP telephone number assignments; the addition of business policies to IP addresses; and the implementation of a one-customer, one-number scenario.

To enable services over these network technologies, service providers need the ability to model all the new devices and infrastructure elements being installed in the network, Mewada said. “You can’t wait for your OSS to incorporate those devices in software. That’s why we have created out-of-the box models for these devices.”

These device models include all major players such as Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco Systems, Mewada said. The company has deployments underway for metro Ethernet and GPON and is in lab trials with VDSL2+ providers.

One of the more interesting new features is in the area of IP address management. NetCracker now supports the ability to add business metrics to IP addresses, which will give them a set of attributes by which service providers can logically cluster groups of addresses by customer type or other metrics.

“You can be much smarter now about how you want to use and manage this resource,” Mewada said. “You can create logical clusters by region to provide different levels of service. If all your IP addresses are equal, that’s not a good thing. You need to be able to treat your special customers special.”