Telcordia Activation Platform Moves in New Direction

Telcordia’s latest release of its activation platform is notable as much for what it eliminates as it is for what it does.

While faster time to market and a lower total cost of ownership are end results, the Activator platform moves the company and its users into a more open environment by working with inventory systems other than its own Granite system and it eliminates the need for service providers to go to their vendors to build specific adapters to activate services on their network equipment. It also takes advantage of virtualization technologies to eliminate the need for individual High Availability servers for various activation functions.

Pablo Martinez, product marketing director for the fulfillment suite, said the company introduced some innovative modelling and scripting technologies in the new release that removes a complete set of development-related costs and time from the new service introduction process.

“We have incorporated major architectural enhancements,” Martinez said. “Usually adapters are developed in a monolithic fashion where the service providers go back to the vendor to develop, compile and make them available, and that takes time. With this approach, we are moving away from that. There will be no need to go back to the vendor to develop adapters. Activator comes with all the utilities for service providers to develop the adapters themselves.”

The goal is to allow service providers to consolidate and automate all service activation onto a single platform.

Bill Wanke, president of operations solutions at Telcordia, said in a statement that Activator streamlines one of the major contributors of delay and expense to next-generation service introduction, and will be a major boost to service providers who want to accelerate their plans for next-generation service rollout without relinquishing control over costs.

Martinez said that the platform also reduces Telcordia’s need to have so many specific vendor relationships around adapters. “With this approach, because we have certified many of the players involved in developing adapters and service providers can now do it themselves, there is no need,” he said. Telcordia already uses what it calls technology packs that can be used as templates for various vendors’ data models and provide a starting point for scripting as well.