Intelligent Fusion

Instant market share advantage. That wasn't the first idea that popped into Jacques Conand's mind when talk of an HP/Compaq merger was bandied about. He's a product guy. He was dreaming the dream of integration, of functionality, of open interfaces. “I'm responsible for everything related to the product — except the sale,” he said.

As scintillating as solving the problems of integration and inter-operability are to a technologist, however, they are merely the means to an end — a business end.

Watching the evolution of the OSS market toward this inevitable end is sad, the same way sports fans find it sad that their heroes are not really in it for the glory of the game. They're in it for the money. It's a business, after all. OSS solutions are no longer about speedy and automated data manipulation or intelligence gathering. That's what they must do, of course, just like athletes must run and hit and catch and throw and sacrifice. But in the end, OSSs also must solve business problems.

That's why Conand, the director of HP's telecom management blade and management software organization, is busy putting into practice HP's new “adaptive management” buzzwords by evolving his products from infrastructure management solutions to business management solutions. With luck and perseverance, the slogan will work better for HP than when Nortel adopted its “adaptive networking” chant — back in the day, as they say.

“Ultimately, what HP wants to do is relate IT to the business, in the sense of adapting the amount of IT a business needs to deliver its business results,” Conand said.

There are three steps to getting there. HP's OpenView network management suite, of which TeMIP is now a part, must first stabilize a business. Then it must make it more efficient. Finally, as Conand said, it must have real-time agility to adapt to the business requirements of an operator and its customers.

The day the merger was announced, Sept. 3, 2001, HP began integrating the two products. Compaq's TeMIP is primarily a telecom network manager that collects and manages alarm and performance information. It is both a standalone solution and a software solution that has been integrated into hardware by several manufacturers. Although used by many wireless operators, HP's OpenView is an IP-based manager of systems and applications that is deployed in the enterprise as well.

At the time of the merger, Leif Hoglund, then with the Tele-Management Forum and now director of OSS research at RHK, wrote in a report on OpenView/TeMIP integration that “to offer any reasonable service management capability, a mobile operator has to be able to consolidate network fault and performance information from their IT department, radio network and transport networks.” By the time the merger actually took place nearly one year later, HP and Compaq were fairly well along on the path to providing that capability.

“During that year, there were a series of ‘clean room’ activities around integration of the product line. So we got started in advance,” Conand said. HP brought about 400 service provider customers to the table, 180 of which were TeMIP users. Half were wireless operators, including Vodafone, which Conand called the most important operator worldwide. That combination of common customers gave the company a head start on a smooth integration, since the products had been interfacing already.

One such operator is E-Plus, the third largest mobile phone provider in Germany, with seven million customers, and a provider of wireless multimedia services. E-Plus credits the integration of OpenView and TeMIP with helping it reorganize under a single operations group. E-Plus substantiates HP's mantra of providing a network-wide view of transport, quality and services from a single platform that also can be used by the separate technology domains within an organization.

“For a central NOC group to manage the whole infrastructure, from radio access to service node, they need to have one team managing from a single point of control,” Conand said. “OpenView now has a very strong product set to manage the whole infrastructure.”

One year after the completed merger, HP is on the third leg of another three-step process integrating these products. Having completed the physical integration and synchronizing the software release schedules, HP must now layer service impact analysis on top of its combined network management capabilities.

For that, HP touts its new service quality management (SQM) product. SQM was announced in February and delivered this June. It monitors and reports quality of service by aggregating key service indicators from all relevant domains, including the operator's own business processes.

“It's a problem managing the quality of such complex services as multi-media messaging or push-to-talk,” Conand said. “It involves a very diverse set of infrastructure elements and indicators and it is much more complex to manage end-to-end than, say, the throughput of a [private virtual circuit].”

It's hard to say how many new customers have been attracted by the combined power of these two technologies, but by virtue of their integration and the synchronization of their upgrades, HP surely won't lose those they already have. And as mobile operators begin to roll out the barrel of new services enabled by 3G networks, having tools that can report on the quality of those services could make the difference between being a market leader and being an also-ran.