Middleware’s Momentum: Net2000 combines Linguateq and Vitria

A year ago, if you asked a telecommunications company for an opinion on middleware, you would hear “costly,” “time-consuming,” and “unnecessary.” In a conspicuous shift in attitude, carriers are taking a hard look at middleware companies, especially EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) providers. Active Software, BEA Systems, InConcert, Vitria Technology and a handful of others are in the spotlight as the telcos’ most wanted.

Popularity has its price, though. Increased demand from a number of market sectors has strained these companies’ resources. The stress fractures are apparent in the lack of final-phase deployments and the growing trend of companies using multiple middleware providers to transfer data to the more unusual, non-mainstream applications.

EAI companies are having particular difficulties with application interoperability in the telco market. Although manufacturers have prefab connectors to the more prevalent SAP and ERP applications used within corporate enterprises, they are lacking connectors for telco applications—many of which were never designed with integration options in mind.

“Some customers may have been led to believe an EAI tool can do everything, but it can’t,” says Harry Tse, vice president of enterprise applications for The Yankee Group. “It only provides a foundation. Carriers will have to adapt additional tools, such as an extraction and formatting tool for specialized data, to complete the job. No vendor can provide all the necessary EAI tools.”

Choosing the right set of middleware tools is a challenge everyone is facing. At Net2000, a facilities-based telco in Reston,Va., the middleware plan includes the combination of Linguateq and a Vitria. As the network-facing middleware tool, Linguateq’s role is to gather the data off the switches and forward it to downstream billing applications. Vitria will be responsible for transferring data among the application databases according to business rules.

Combining the products makes sense, according to Mike Edwards, director of IT Applications at Net2000. “Vitria can’t support moving large volumes of data, and Linguateq can’t support application-to-application development.”

Bits and Bytes on Linguateq

Privately held Linguateq was founded in 1995 and currently has 63 employees. Linguateq views itself as a separate, necessary piece of the middleware puzzle. “We are an EAI tool, but we don’t compete against companies such as Vitria,” explains Marleen O’Leary, director of professional services. “Most EAI tools are object oriented and process-centric, and we are data-centric. Our technology allows carriers to use information further downstream, where huge amounts of data at the bitstream level are used.”

Linguateq claims that its software can save telcos $600,000 to $800,000 because a separate mediation device is not required and it reduces life-cycle maintenance. Although it’s problematic for any company to add projected cost savings into an accounting spreadsheet, Net2000 was attracted to the company’s software as a means to move away from traditional call collection and mediation devices. Edwards depicts the software as an amalgamation of middleware, data collection, and mediation.

“For us, [we needed it to] move accounting data as well as order management information. And it could generate alarms and log files, and disperse the data into our back office systems,” says Edwards. “We were looking for something that would support more than accounting and billing data.”

Directing and redirecting the data

Net2000 began this project in October 1999. After the time-consuming process of determining the data formats was over, Linguateq and its integration partner Canopy International (formerly ObTech) integrated the software in two months.

Linguateq’s TAI (Telecommunications Application Integration) software receives customer traffic data from Net2000’s three Nortel DMS-500 voice switches located in Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Richmond, Va. Future plans include pulling data from all Net2000’s voice switches.

Linguateq captures two feeds from each switch. It gathers AMA data for local traffic and CDRs for long-distance traffic, then sends the data to the appropriate downstream systems, which include CHA CABS, Bill Tamer, Super Sleuth, and ADC Saville Systems. The data is also distributed into Nortel’s Supernode Data Manager, an OAMP server designed to help move network information into the operations systems. The incoming AMA records and CDRs are formatted in hexadecimal at the bitstream level, which the TAI software translates into readable formats for the billing, auditing, and reporting systems.

One of Net2000’s requirements for this process was that its downstream systems remain undisturbed. To do this, Linguateq and Canopy built connectors based on the data’s attributes, such as extra variable length, encoding, and data format (hex or ASCII).

The software relies on two-path mediation to maintain the independence of the source and destination applications. First, the software creates a meta-model based on the data stream’s syntax definition and contextual meta information. All information about incoming and outgoing data streams is retained in the meta-model, and it is used to translate the incoming switch data into a readable format for the downstream applications.

Although data translation is the key feature of Linguateq, network and data integrity are also addressed. On the network side, if the software doesn’t receive a feed from the switch in a specified amount of time, it will send an alarm to a network technician. The software massages the data into formats used in industry-standard databases, such as Telcordia’s local exchange routing guide (LERG) and Valuecom, to ensure that what goes downstream is clean and usable. At Net2000, local terminating access records and intralata toll records are routed over the same trunk group, Edwards explains. “We use the Valuecom lookup to determine jurisdiction to populate the settlement code in the CABS EMI record,” he says, “and we use the LERG database to help create summary records for our auditing tool. It helps us determine to which carriers we owe access charges.”

Building autonomy and independence

Linguateq is developing a GUI that will allow Net2000 to add new services without additional outside programming. The telco’s IT staff will use the software to apply known data stream syntax and mappings--such as defaults, definition characteristics, mapping rules, translation rules, filter rules, and edit rules--to new data streams. “We don’t have the skill sets to handle complex connectors at this point, but we are learning to create straightforward connectors such as CDR, AMA, and operational measurements,” says Edwards.

In the coming months, Net2000 plans to expand into New York and Boston territories. “When these switches come on, we will be able to configure the software to pick up the new switch feeds. If we build new equipment, we will be able to configure how we want to collect the data ourselves,” says Matt Costello, Net2000’s assistant vice president of information technology.

Edwards foresees the opportunity to configure a variety of information used in downstream applications. “We have records that need to be customized, such as reporting and duplication,” he says. “The software gives us the ability to define tools and develop tools that will allow us to build our own connectors that will read and translate the data.”

EAI leads to software reorg

With Linguateq software in place, Net2000 will tackle deploying its second middleware tool. The telco was close to selecting Active Software when Vitria came back with an offer that made Edwards and Costello reconsider their options.

In choosing an EAI tool, Costello and Edwards weighed each manufacturer’s relationships with the tools already at work within their system. Both companies have strong relationships with MetaSolv, Saville, and DSET, says Edwards.

Net2000 has already begun gathering the object modeling information necessary for the Vitria to begin creating the interfaces. Both Costello and Edwards expect Saville to be the biggest challenge, due to the software’s proprietary nature. “In the past, Saville was more focused on building APIs,” says Costello. “Since the acquisition, though, ADC is pushing it to be more open.”

Adding Vitria will disrupt some of the point-to-point solutions in progress at Net2000. Costello considered deploying MetaSolv and Saville’s integrated product, but decided against it because of the product’s high price tag and, says Costello, its “limited functionality and applicability to how we use Saville and MetaSolv.” Instead, Net2000 built an interim in-house solution that integrates MetaSolv and Saville, but it only works for a small subset of products. This spring or summer, Costello hopes to replace his workaround with connectors from Vitria.

When Costello looks ahead at how he will use Vitria , connecting MetaSolv and Saville tops his agenda. Soon afterward he will connect Siebold to MetaSolv and Saville to improve Net2000’s CRM potential. He and Edwards are still debating whether they will integrate the Linguateq software and Vitria using an XML link.

The impetus behind much of the application integration is flow-through provisioning, slated for implementation in the fourth quarter of 2000. “We have all the components in place,” says Edwards. “Nortel’s SuperNode Data Manager has an OSSDI CORBA interface that will support flow-through provisioning and inventory synchronization, and MetaSolv is aggressively developing the necessary APIs. Linguateq will probably not be part of that solution.”

Influential partners

Nortel Networks has had a significant role in Net2000’s network development. In November 1998, Net2000 entered a five-year, $120 million credit agreement with the equipment manufacturer. Since then the company has continued to pump money--and resources--into the telco. Twenty-two full-time Nortel employees are helping Net2000 build its network, and at the time of its initial public offering (IPO) in March, Nortel had a $30 million equity investment in the company, plus it had provided $150 million for debt and equipment financing of Net2000’s network buildout.

Prior to Net2000’s IPO, Nortel subsidized software that was compatible with its switches. For every dollar that Net2000 spent on compatible software, Nortel would repay 50 cents. According to Robert Bannon, Net2000’s director of investor relations, the Nortel arrangement is no longer in place.

Concentrating on Nortel’s network equipment gave Net2000 a strong network-centric view, but often required it to purchase a second product that was more operational-centric. The Linguateq and Vitria tag-team approach is one example of this occurrence. Other areas where Net2000 has a two-pronged approach are gateways, in which Telcordia and DSET cohabitate, and order management, in which MetaSolv and Wisor share responsibilities.

Edwards and Costello view these dual packages as complimentary solutions, not redundancies. In the case of Linguateq and Vitria, Edwards says, “We haven’t purchased duplicate software. We need both products. There’s a natural fit between the movement of large volumes of data and the application-to-application functions that we will be relying on Vitria to provide. Either tool could provide both solutions, but they are stronger in the separate areas where we are using them.”

According to Costello, the tools were bought based on functionality, compatibility, and interoperability with existing applications. “We purchase products based on integration success. DSET had already integrated with MetaSolv, which enabled us to have ASRs in record time to Bell Atlantic,” he says. “In the case of Wisor, it provided us functionality that we could not get from another vendor.”