Bringing the Outside In: One Inventory Management System, or Many?
Michelle Hankins
02/01/2003
Here’s the scenario: A large business customer’s services go down. The provider checks its fault management display to see if something is wrong in the network, but everything checks out okay. Perhaps an optical pipe or some other piece of the physical equipment is failing, and it is time to get on the phone with the people on that side of the fence.
Whether it is a telephone pole or a switch, providers are asking for more sophisticated systems to see the entire breadth of their network assets. Traditionally, providers have managed two systems to log and track all of their network equipment—one for managing outside plant inventory, and one for inside plant (logical network elements). Now, pressure is building in the industry to better combine the features of both systems to give a holistic view of the network. But whether software vendors are ready to deliver on that demand remains to be seen.
“Given that inventory is almost always inaccurate, providers are constantly looking at ways to improve their systems and processes to track network devices,” says Robert Lane, Elematics’ vice president of product management and marketing. “Some at the corporate level would love to tie those disparate systems together and only have one.”
What’s Out, What’s In
“Most outside plant is about what’s in the ground,” says Francis Haysom, vice president of architecture at Cramer Systems. It can be the manhole covers, the telephone poles, cabling, channels, ductwork and conduits. The outside plant keeps track of assets like the wired pairs and some optical fiber that runs to the big offices.
It is considered distinct because it involves building and construction, such
as digging a trench, Haysom states. The responsibilities for outside plant inventory
rest more on the civil engineering side.
“The thing about outside plant is it is very silent. It doesn’t come back and talk to you,” he explains. Typically, a completely separate segment of software companies track and manage the outside plant inventory. These are the computer-aided design (CAD) and the geographic information systems (GIS) vendors of the world. Among these are CADTel, GE Network Solutions and Mesa Solutions.
Inside plant systems usually support the service delivery or fulfillment processes. These systems commonly track elements such as switches, routers, frame and ATM devices, and optical devices. They would track the central office, floor space management, inside plant cable and rack-mounted equipment to support the design life cycle. Among the companies that track this type of inventory are Axiom Systems, Cramer Systems, Elematics, Granite Systems and NetCracker.
Generally, for example, the inside plant system would track that a cable modem is at your house, what its serial number is and who is served by this feed from the head end. However, “if you needed to find out what’s in between, you’d go to the CAD system” normally used for managing outside plant inventory, says Mark Mortensen, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of product management at Granite Systems.
Everything the inside plant system tracks is connected with cabling, and that is how outside plant and inside plant are connected and what causes them to tend to overlap. Both are key to delivering service. Yet many systems have been developed to track one or the other, but not both.
In many companies, the departments that have traditionally managed outside and inside plant inventory management are distinctly separate. Their operational tasks are generally different—one would handle the preconfiguration of the network, and one would handle provisioning.
Cramer’s Haysom explains that within one provider, those two groups are known as access planning, which deals with the physical network side, and electronic record, which handles the fulfillment and automated provisioning process. Often the tasks of the two, and the data for analyzing them, come together only at the vice president level.
The network engineers characteristically purchase the outside plant systems or facility management products, while operations groups buy OSS that deals with inside plant.
To support an integrated system, these separate organizations and departments within a provider would need to unite.
The Call for Convergence
A couple of years ago, providers likely would not have sought out one product to manage both inside and outside plant inventory, yet in the last six to nine months, they have begun looking for a single solution, according to Julie Wingerter, NetCracker’s vice president of strategy.
“To be honest, I don’t think we fully realized what a gap this was in the industry,” she admits. “The same customer, but two different people were approaching us and asking the same questions, but for different areas,” she says. NetCracker would often receive an RFP from two different departments for internal and external inventory management at the same provider.
“There is an overlap of what both communities require,” explains Haysom, but each also has granular information needs that the other does not. “The accuracy of a copper or fiber network can be compromised” if these departments fail to communicate, Haysom believes.
But the problem is that these systems are typically very separate from one another. They have not been integrated at all in the past, according to Granite’s Mortensen. “They kind of grew up as two different things,” he explains. The inside plant system is good at tracking the logical network, but ordinarily not very good for mapping and GIS like the outside plant systems.
Why Now?
“Customers are demanding from service providers that they have a far more holistic view of the network,” says Gareth Senior, chief technology officer at Axiom Systems. And with a greater emphasis on operational efficiency, providers are targeting areas where one system could do the job of two. During the heyday of the not-so-distant past, the attitude was to simply build out the network.
“Providers grew so fast, they’re really trying to go back and understand what’s out in the field,” says Mesa Solutions’ Thomas Counts, president and chief executive officer. Now, many believe there is a fiber glut and are focused on network optimization. “They are trying to maximize their assets,” he says.
Those companies are also looking to slim down hefty integration costs. “Service providers today are not willing to spend millions of dollars on a system and then millions of dollars to have them integrated,” says Senior.
Tiered Desires
Both outside and inside plant inventory management recognize that smaller service providers—Tier 2 and Tier 3—are leading the call for one system. Scott Casey product marketing manager at GE Network Solutions, says these providers want a product that manages the network end to end. As for the Tier 1 providers, he says, “they have run their business as two systems for so long, they do not want to integrate.” Some Tier 1 providers have separate systems developed in-house for inside and outside plant. Or they might have a legacy system that is 10 to 15 years old and at the end of its life cycle, in which case they would probably seek out an off-the-shelf replacement.
Senior says the PTTs that Axiom usually works with have several in-house systems that they would have to think hard about before going ahead with this implementation because the decision maker puts himself at the risk of blame if the project suffers set-backs. For Tier 1 providers, “There is a business case to replace all of these systems,” he says, “but because this implementation is seen as high risk by the PTTs, perhaps 50 percent would consider replacing some systems and 50 percent would consider consolidating some,” he estimates. “Generally the networks at major carriers are very complex and merging plant management for outside and inside inventory means the decision-maker needs to be confident that the operation will work on time and to budget.”
Right now, Tier 1 providers are mostly deploying best-of-breed solutions for physical and logical inventory management, keeping them separate. Those providers are just now starting to think about integrating the two with the push being from executives within these companies—chief operating officers and senior directors or vice presidents—who are thinking in terms of capital expenditures. With two systems, financial asset reporting is difficult because information from those different areas has to be correlated and reconciled. In addition, providers must perform a lot of regulatory reporting, and that spans both inside and outside plant. These could be major reasons for Tier 1 providers to consider and integrated system.
The Case for Joining Systems
Making a business case for a single system is not entirely difficult. The inside plan system tends to play a role involving day-to-day high-volume transactions, whereas the outside plant system tends to focus more on the long-term role of network planning.
Among the problems that arise with two systems is that planned capacity may not be made available to the provisioning system. Haysom points to an example of one provider, where Cramer found that 20 to 40 percent of copper set into the ground could not be used by the service provisioning process because of the lack of ongoing synchronization and reconciliation between the systems for physical outside plant and provisioning. This happens because the provisioning system has no knowledge of actual capacity.
Likewise, when providers try to synchronize the two systems to run a monthly report, errors will occur in either or both inventory management systems.
In addition, having two systems makes it more difficult to identify active shortfalls in the network. Network planning could be enhanced and more efficient if planning efforts used data from across the entire network. GE Network Solutions’ Casey says assets are assets, and if a provider is conducting network planning and design or engineering, it would be wise not to separate that information from the logical or inside plant information.
Haysom believes providers could exercise better planning judgment rather than poor network guessing and estimated planning. A provider, for example, could match the network resources against actual service uptake and know exactly what it has versus what’s being used.
NetCracker’s Wingerter says having one system better supports automated provisioning. Providers not only want to turn up services quickly to chalk up revenue, they have a critical need to avoid churn or dissatisfied customers. Today, Wingerter points out, some providers’ customers have to wait for services up to 90 days after ordering. Automating this process via one system could dramatically cut the time it takes to roll out a service for a new customer. The key information that inside and outside plant systems share, she says, is customer information. Providers need to know which customer is tied to which network elements, and having one system to track all the assets and match them against customer data would be beneficial.
Providers have still other reasons to correlate this information. They could use a single system for fault tracking to better assess the impact of a network outage and resolve issues faster. By crossing the affected part of the network with the affected customers and correlating the logical and physical network assets, providers could better prioritize which network equipment to fix first.
Determining who is responsible for troubleshooting in the network is often difficult. Numerous phone calls jump back and forth between the inside and outside plant people. “It’s just a much more manual process,” Wingerter explains; having two systems is fine when things are running correctly, but when trouble arises, the provider must put out fires and send someone out to actually get the incident data.
As well, says Counts at Mesa Solutions, “with churn, [there is a] need to focus on QoS.” A single system could better manage quality of service by enabling the provider to view a complete service path and enhance network maintenance. QoS and asset recovery “are the real drivers today,” Counts says.
Diverse Models
Providers employ various methods to actually link their outside and inside plant systems. Some will keep two separate systems, some will try to integrate them more tightly, and others prefer one system.
Most providers are opting to retain two different systems, with a unified view into the network. If a customer calls and alerts a provider that something is broken, at that same point the provider could switch right into its GIS system and identify the problem. Mortensen at Granite explains that this setup could involve two different user interfaces that work like one.
Many providers, he says, are asking outside and inside plant vendors to more tightly integrate their products. Ideally they want both sides to work together to synchronize product development as they keep evolving their system interfaces. If one company changed its interface, both would do so to synchronize the product development times.
Some vendors claim to model inventory management for both inside and outside plant in one product, but often they will actually model just the area where the two overlap, leaving the detailed aspects of the area in which they do not specialize to their counterpart vendors. For example, Senior says Axiom’s product spans from the logical recording of inventory through outside plant, but that it leaves sophisticated GIS mapping to specialist companies.
“We don’t look to duplicate information,” he says. “If a GIS platform requires a database from which to pull that information, it would pull that from our system.” Likewise, if a GIS platform has information the logical system needs, Axiom would synchronize its information against what the GIS system has, to make sure its information is right.
Mortensen points out that, in similar fashion, some cable companies are already using Granite for managing outside plant inventory, but they do not keep the GIS information in the system.
Likewise, Elematics deals mainly with the logical inventory, as its product does not handle unintelligent network devices. Cramer focuses on modeling
the devices and connectivity with the goal of provisioning. It wouldn’t, for example, model detailed cables and joints within them.
Casey says the GE Smallworld product models both outside and inside plant inventory, but the company’s focus is on the physical network. A solution combining its product with that of a major company in logical plant management models close to 100 percent of both aspects of the network, he says. Currently, the majority of GE’s 160 customers use its product for managing outside plant inventory, while only one-quarter use it for managing both physical and logical sides.
Mesa also concentrates on the outside plant. Counts says, “We’ve worked closely with Cramer and Granite to make sure we don’t step on each other.” He explains that if a provider is turning up circuits, it might look to a Cramer or a Granite; if a provider is leasing equipment, and doesn’t really possess its own inventory of bandwidth to worry about, Mesa’s product would make more sense.
“Pretty much everywhere we’re deployed it’s an integrated solution,” Counts says. “There is some overlap there, but the complements of using the two together” is more robust than relying on product overlap. The logical vendors’ products can discover unused bandwidth, parts and equipment, whereas Mesa’s would mainly manage things like cross-connects, patch panels and other non-intelligent devices. As Counts jokingly points out, “You can’t auto-discover a telephone pole.”
In the Future
Lane says many of Elematics’ customers would think one system is great, but he does not know of any vendors that go to that breadth and depth simultaneously to support the needs of most providers.
Robert Curran, director of communications at Cramer Systems, likewise sees no vendor from either camp that has successfully combined the two jobs of both systems. He expects to see “combinations of applications managing inventory” in the future, with companies each figuring out on their own how to reconcile that information.
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