Members of the telecom OSS industry gathered at the OSS World 2002 show in
San Diego on Feb. 4 to recognize some of the industry’s leading companies, their
products and the impact that they’ve had on the telecommunications market. The
2002 OSS World Excellence Awards highlighted new companies as well as established
players.
Best Overall Product:
Granite Systems
This award went to the company that demonstrated the best product offered
in the OSS space in 2002. Selected was Granite’s Xpercom, a service resource
management system, which stores and manipulates all of the physical and logical
resources needed to manage a service provider’s network and services.
Granite’s customers include some of the world’s largest service providers,
including Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, AT&T Broadband, Deutsche Telekom,
Colt, and “next-generation” providers such as Sphera Optical and Advanced
Telecom Group.
Granite has more than 50 customers in the United States and Europe, Latin
America and the Asia-Pacific region. It serves more than 10,000 engineering
users and 40,000 Web-based users worldwide.
Providers report that Xpercom reduced provisioning times and operation costs
by 30 percent and lowered capital equipment needs by 10 percent.
Customer Success
Story: Compaq
Key criteria for judging this category were that product deployment was a
success and that a visible team effort existed between the service provider
and the vendor. For a vendor to be considered for this award, it needed to
have a thorough understanding of a client’s network, legacy systems and functionality
needs.
This year’s winner, Compaq, became integral to Con Edison’s telecommunications
project in Manhattan. Con Edison Communications operates a fiber network for
the New York metro area. By 2005 the network is expected to interconnect more
than a thousand commercial buildings, POPs and Verizon central offices from
Westchester County to Manhattan, and from Brooklyn to Newark.
ConEd selected Compaq’s Telecommunications Management Information Platform
(TeMIP) to deliver a range of managed services. Compaq provides ConEd with
customer care, network engineering, order management, SLA management and a
financial system.
Best New OSS
Company: Valaran
This award went to the newcomer whose mission, product, leadership team and
accomplishments represent the best in innovation in the industry. Valaran
secured financing, signed up customers and delivered on its commitments—in
spite of the fact that 2001 was a tough year.
Valaran, based in Princeton, N.J., developed the v-aerial application integration
framework. Based on Sun’s JINI technology, v-aerial provides a business-modeling
tool, rules engine, and common application communication and management services
that integrate the OSS in a single, uniform framework. The platform is integrated
at the business process layer, rather than the functional layer, which frees
the customer to fold in the right OSS components rather than having to use
only preselected applications.
Best New Product: Trendium
Consumer demands have put pressure on providers to deliver services faster,
better and cheaper. Products that can address these challenges and handle
next-generation services, support multiple standards and offer differentiated
functionality were considered for this year’s award for best new product.
The award went to Trendium’s ServicePath policy-based software suite. Trendium
signed its first European customer, NavLink, in March 2001. NavLink designs,
hosts and manages Internet and wireless services through data centers in Europe,
the Middle East and Africa. It uses ServicePath to manage the QoS levels delivered
to its customers.
Best Order Management System: Sigma Systems
Order management systems are responsible for touching several parts of the
OSS and ensuring that the back end runs smoothly. Because today’s OSS both
defines and controls the activities between the various network and application
layers, a flexible OSS architecture can make the difference between a service
provider’s success and failure.
Two-thirds of all new cable Internet activations by Tier 1 multiple service
operators in North America are provisioned using Sigma products. Six of North
America’s largest MSOs and the world’s largest cable ISP use Sigma’s Cable
Broadband in a Box to provision a wide variety of digital cable services.
The company’s cable clients serve more than 35 million subscribers.
When Excite@Home subscribers had to be migrated to new ISPs, several major
cable operators selected Sigma’s Service Management Portfolio product. The
migration projects—technically complex initiatives—were completed without
disrupting service.
Best Provisioning System: Syndesis
The faster a service provider can bring new services to market and provision
customers, the quicker it can generate revenue. Providers rely on systems
that automate disparate provisioning tasks to reduce bottlenecks and errors
and maintain high customer satisfaction.
This year’s award went to the Syndesis NetProvision product for its upload
capabilities, which allow a provider to retrieve active inventory information
from the network and to minimize order fallout. Swisscom, using NetProvision,
reduced provisioning time for new VPN customers from 45 minutes to 3.5 minutes;
the system lets Swisscom provision 800 new VPN implementations per month.
Bell Canada, Qwest Communications, USLEC and Yipes also use NetProvision.
Best Inventory Management: Cramer Systems
For any provider, provisioning would not be possible without knowledge of
the capacity of the network. The best inventory management systems eliminate
resource redundancy, optimize the network and improve provisioning times.
More than 30 customers in Europe use Cramer Systems’ Dimension, including
BT, BT Cellnet, Cable & Wireless, KPN, KPN Mobile and Telewest. Dimension
is aimed at both wireless and wireline operators and supports the range from
traditional voice services to 3G to IP VPNs.
Cramer Dimension is credited for cutting service provisioning time for customers
by up to 40 percent, with implementation times of about three months. The
Active Inventory Platform supports customers with more than 1 million circuits.
Best Network Management System: Riversoft
An effective network management system must prevent service interruptions,
generate detailed real-time reports for smart capacity planning and make accurate
decisions for network growth. Riversoft’s Network Management Operating System
also supports enterprise customers such as Barclays Global Investors, British
Airways and Deutsche Bank. The system is designed to let service providers
view the network environment at the customer level as well as at the divisional
level
Best Systems Integrator: Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
An OSS product is only as good as its implementation. However, a well-know
fact in the industry is that many integration projects fail and in most cases
run way beyond budget. With those risks in mind, the pressure is on to select
a proactive and skilled systems integrator that can tackle complexities, be
on time and stay within budget.
The Telecom Media Networks group of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young recently delivered
the OSS for a network services company specializing in high-capacity transport.
The system has many customized capabilities, including automated policies
to correlate network alarms with customers, allowing the service provider
to prioritize trouble resolution. It distinguishes between service-affecting
and network maintenance alarms, keeping mean time to repair to a minimum.
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