NetCracker takes NExT step at France Telecom

During the selection process, vendors had to apply their solutions to 478 test cases and scenarios across fixed, mobile, core, IT and radio technologies for variously sized operating companies. Having done that and been selected in November 2006 as the official NGI supplier for France Telecom’s NExT program, NetCracker had to prove itself in the field before being certified for other properties.

The selection process had been determined by performance in France Telecom’s lab. “The second part was implementing the platform across a number of different properties, and it came down to if, indeed, what held up in the lab held up in real life, then we would get that certification as the default platform across all 136 properties,” Mewada said.

NetCracker has so far been implemented in about one dozen France Telecom properties in Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

This week, NetCracker became certified for all France Telecom properties for its NetCracker Framework (which includes a unified data model with template libraries, a process automation and workflow engine, a unified security system, a reporting environment, advanced administration and management tools, and a configurable, web-based user interface), physical and logical resource inventory, service inventory and discovery and reconciliation modules.

For operating companies under the France Telecom umbrella requiring solutions for outside plant, asset management and telecom cost management, the operator certified NetCracker’s solutions as optional.

The MTS deployment has been completed in Moscow and the Central Russian Region. There NetCracker will optimize infrastructure and inventory management processes and establish a central information source for the planning, design and management of the MTS network. MTS will use NetCracker’s Resource Inventory, Outside Plant, Service Provisioning, and Discovery & Reconciliation product modules. MTS is planning to complete the rollout of the NetCracker solution to the rest of the regions inside Russia by the end of the second quarter in 2008.