Resource Reconnaissance

“Inventory is the foundation of the OSS structure” is the slogan for a slew of companies attempting to capitalize on carriers’ lack of capital. An accurate inventory, the developers claim, will speed provisioning, lower customer churn and reduce equipment costs. These companies are aiming their pitch at carriers’ current soft spot: cost containment.

With the recent race to build out their networks, engineers and field personnel at the telcos frequently brought new equipment up as quickly as possible, without documenting where the devices were, what they did, who manufactured them or how they were configured. The meager notes that were taken were placed in Excel spreadsheets, screen captures, Visio graphics, file folders or index cards. No records were stored in a central repository. Instead each region, department or satellite office maintained its own separate records, and each group had its own procedures for updating the records.

These separate, static, inaccurate stockpiles of inventory data are now causing a ripple effect within operational support systems, slowing provisioning and making network management more difficult than necessary. “Carriers are walking blind without a Seeing Eye dog,” says Robert Heil, president of ENA.

Heil blames huge network buildouts, mergers and acquisitions, and multiple OSSs for carriers’ slim understanding of their inventory. The inventory’s ambiguous nature is a recent problem, says Julie Wingerter, vice president of strategy at NetCracker, that will be getting more attention from service providers in the coming months. “The carriers need to know their capacity limitations.”

Quickly assessing where a switch is, how many ports it has and what types of cards are loaded is only one aspect of what’s needed. NetCracker, ENA and their competitors want to take the isolated stockpiles of inventory data and add recent network changes, speed provisioning, and improve network management and design capabilities.

By combining inventory data with customer and network information, the developers claim their centralized, single-view systems can offer provisioning, design and management benefits. Some players, such as Cramer, Emperative and Protek, emphasize their provisioning capabilities; others, including CoManage, ENA and Netscient, lean toward network management. But all are trying to make inventory multidimensional and increase its significance within the OSS.

Provisioning Aid

Most companies in this space see decreasing provisioning times as the key benefit of maintaining accurate inventory records. The typical ILEC, says Kimber Lewis, president of Cramer Systems, was able to turn up a voice-based service without exception approximately 28 percent of the time in 1996. Three years later, the service without exception rate only improved to 35 percent.

Considering all the software development and OSS discussion during the past few years, this improvement rate of 7 percentage points is staggeringly low. The accuracy rate could be dramatically improved, claim the inventory folks, if the provisioning system better understood the network equipment.

“When the provisioning system interrogates the network to discover capacity, it hits a bottleneck if the equipment data is on spreadsheets or in proprietary databases,” says Nick Burton, head of marketing at Netscient. The staff must resort to scrolling through dozens of spreadsheets to locate the appropriate network information, making provisioning a DSL circuit or T-1 line a weeks- or months-long process.

“Carriers are building in time in the provisioning cycle because they expect the order to fail a couple of times before they can get it right,” says Randy Fuller, vice president of marketing at Emperative. “Hundreds and thousands of changes occur on the network on a daily basis, from unidentified cards to someone disturbing a fiber optic link.”

A typical error that slows provisioning occurs when line cards are installed in a different slot. A technician may have been told to place the card in slot five, but he had to put it in slot six because slot five may have been taken or the technician just placed the card in the wrong slot. “Technicians and engineers are under pressure to get the service up,” explains Fuller. “They may do something that they don’t want to show up in the records, or they may do something different than what they were asked to do. Regardless, bringing the service up was more important than updating the inventory records.”

Another problem that takes a toll on inventory accuracy is that disconnected equipment is not always returned to the service pool. The equipment is left out in the field, and it appears to be in service but it’s not. “If a carrier is using a manual method to track inventory, it will never know that this equipment is available,” says Dave Eagles, product marketing manager at Protek. “Autodiscovery tools can alert the carrier that no customers are on the equipment and there are no connections. Service providers have a lot of spare capacity that is being unused.”

Both these scenarios can wreck an inventory’s accuracy rate and drag out the provisioning process. “To provision and activate a single service, the system must talk to 16 to 20 boxes,” says Razi Imam, vice president of marketing and business development at CoManage. “Everyone wants to just click on icons to create an end-to-end service. But if you don’t know if you have the boxes, if they are working, or what ports are available, you can’t establish the service. Provisioning becomes a long process of searching for information and entering line commands.”

To overcome these problems, the inventory companies want to establish their database as the common view of the customer and the network. Or, they want to integrate inventory information with other OSSs to enable flow-through provisioning. The goal is to combine geographical information, such as how far the business or home is from the central office, with line quality or the load coils, with DSLAM information from the network element system, as well as bandwidth availability and what type of quality of service can be provisioned on a given port.

Discovery Zone

Providers acknowledge that populating the inventory system is tedious and time-consuming. Entering all the sites, the equipment at each site, nodes, ports, shelves, IP addresses and customer IDs associated with each device takes time and requires knowledgeable personnel. To smooth the process and ferret out equipment information, some inventory companies use autodiscovery. The software uses SNMP to gather equipment data and then enters it into the inventory system, or customization may be necessary to get the appropriate data.

The inventory companies are strongly divided when it comes to autodiscovery. They either view the technology as the only way to keep the inventory up to date, or they assert that it is not advanced enough to be adept at recognizing a significant number of devices.

“The current level of functionality of autodiscovery doesn’t lend itself to being a huge benefit for inventory management,” says Netscient’s Burton. “Even with autodiscovery, much of the information must be input manually, often causing more work. We want to wait until the tools are more mature and can remove the manual process completely.”

ENA also has its reservations. “Autodiscovery is a boutique area. You must have strong relationships with all the vendors to keep the information up to date,” says Heil. “And not everything in the network is positioned to be autodiscovered. Much of the PSTN equipment is not intelligent, leaving only 20 percent to 30 percent of the network that can be discovered.”

Even when equipment such as routers can be autodiscovered, they don’t always provide the necessary information, says Mark Mortensen, chief marketing officer at Granite Systems. “You can get information about racks, cards and parameters set on the cards, but not configuration.”

The autodiscovery camp responds that it’s a must-have to keep accurate records. “Carriers maintain a baseline of the inventory, do audits and create a circuit layout, but the information is only good for the point and time the data was captured,” says Jane Lehar, manager of new services at ADC. “As soon as you walk away, the inventory becomes corrupt unless you have autodiscovery.”

Not only does autodiscovery keep the inventory up to date, it speeds the process of entering equipment information, says CoManage’s Imam. “Managing, maintaining and editing the inventory package is a huge challenge for service providers. Our tools populate the database, reducing the manual workload.”

Protek also uses autodiscovery and can identify the type of card, the manufacturer, location, the ports and the ports used, whether the device is in service, the number of circuits riding on the device and customer IDs. Protek relies on management systems such as Micromuse to define the equipment. For example, if it’s a new card that hasn’t been defined, Protek will flag it but will not be able to provide any information about it.

“Element managers provide a vast amount of data,” says Protek’s Eagles. “We map that information into our inventory fields and include heavy auditing to flag duplications or missing fields. This process helps remove manual intervention.”

If a company doesn’t have autodiscovery, it usually recognizes that it will have to partner with a company that does. Cramer has chosen to spend resources on creating adapters that leverage the autodiscovered network against its inventory. “Autodiscovery is a huge undertaking,” says Lewis. “It’s more than we want to do, so we’re leaving that to others.”

CoManage is one of the companies that inventory managers look to as a partner for autodiscovery. Imam foresees CoManage’s software co-existing with the larger inventory players. “Service providers will need both,” he says. “Autodiscovery provides information about the current, live network. New equipment purchases, equipment discards, and asset management come from inventory packages. Autodiscovery is necessary to keep the inventory packages from getting out of synch.”

Carrier Hesitancy

Carriers are beginning to listen to the inventory providers’ message, but the developers are still experiencing some pushback. “Service providers are fearful of the work and time it will take to enter the information into the system,” says ENA’s Heil. “And they aren’t sure that they will keep the data up to date.”

In response, the software companies are adding features to simplify data entry and offering professional services to lead the projects. NetCracker has a database of 35,000 devices. If any of the 35,000 devices are on the network, NetCracker will automatically populate the inventory database with its information.

Inventory companies also use templates that allow for quick cutting and pasting of information. ENA has added a cloning feature that speeds the entry process. “When service providers build out a switch they have thousands of connections,” says Heil. “We can clone the first entry and then only have to go back to change serial numbers. This feature can save weeks of time.”

To ensure data accuracy, companies such as ENA and ADC offer auditing support. After the software gathers any electronic information from spreadsheets or screen shots, the data goes into a common repository. The auditing team then steps in to validate the information’s accuracy. Heil estimates that the loading and auditing phase should take three to six months.

When adding an inventory system, Heil cautions service providers to deploy the new software in phases: “People want to eat the whole elephant at once, but they need to take a more controlled approach.” He advises running the old procedures and practices until all the new procedures are in place with parallel runs before the cutover to ensure accuracy. “Everyone wants the system up and running in three months, but it’s not that easy,” he says. “We’re trying to take a lot of the pain away, but we can’t make it quick.”

To maintain the system, Netscient’s Burton recommends that service providers create a data integrity department. Fibernet, a Netscient customer in the United Kingdom, has changed its organizational structure and created a department that is solely responsible for ensuring data reliability.

Money Talks

Inventory developers are taking their message to the entire carrier community. Companies such as Cramer are focusing on Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers, and others like ENA have set their sights on Tier 2 and Tier 3 carriers. The newer competitive players, says Burton, are showing more interest in the systems than the traditional providers.

“RBOCs and incumbents stand to benefit the most from inventory systems, but they are hesitant,” Burton says. “They have so many systems that the sheer task of doing the initial audit of the network is overwhelming. They have been the most reluctant to get on the bandwagon.”

To strengthen their inventory argument, the developers are crunching numbers to predict ROI for their software. The players are targeting their appeals to the CFOs because they see these executives making the ultimate purchasing decisions. “It’s not just a technology sale,” says Cramer’s Lewis.

To support its ROI pitch, Cramer created a tool kit and a set of metrics that allow carriers to formulate budgets and manage performance. “A guaranteed ROI reduces the cost of entry,” says Lewis. “Our biggest challenge is reconciling tangible metrics.” Cramer, as well as its competitors, claims it can cut capital expenditures anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent.

Burton agrees that the decision is moving away from the engineers and IT department. “Many service providers will be forced to maintain an inventory system,” he says. “The financial folks are putting pressure on the IT departments. CFOs are saying they can’t have any more money and that they have to make the most of what is on the network. Since the engineers don’t know what is on network, they must begin assessing their inventory.”

With the capital climate among service providers changing, inventory developers claim that their software is beginning to get the attention it deserves. “Inventory is not a missionary sale,” says NetCracker’s Wingerter. “If service providers want to be competitive, they need to understand their capacity and have an efficient network.”