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Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks Join Forces to Develop Joint Network Management Platform
By Dr. Matthew Lucas
Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks announced this week a new initiative to jointly develop an industry-standard element management system (EMS). The platform will combine Cisco’s Active Network Abstraction (ANA) IP EMS product and Nokia’s Open EMS Suite—thereby providing a unified platform for Nokia’s transport, mobile and broadband infrastructure as well as Cisco’s platforms—and will be open to the industry.
As part of the agreement, Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks will deliver a common end-to-end network view of both IP and mobile network elements that are automatically discovered and represented as a virtual network model. In addition, the platform will provide a complete view of network resources regardless of technologies or vendors.
As you would expect, the system includes the traditional fault, configuration, performance and security management functionality. But several twists make the announcement a big deal.
First, and most obvious, it will roll up the Nokia Siemens and Cisco element management systems in place today. According to OSS Observer, these element interfaces cover about 25 percent of telco assets deployed today, giving the platform huge market coverage—perhaps even status as a de facto standard.
Second, the EMS spans core transport, broadband and mobile domains. This is significant because bridging the fixed and mobile network domains is fundamental for bringing much needed new services like FMC and enterprise applications to market.
Third, the initiative covers data acquisition and network element mediation. In the past, Cisco has stayed out of the mediation business, leaving that to OSS ecosystem partners. But this initiative changes the game somewhat, because it consolidates usage processing and collection functions and will allow direct EMS integration into higher-level OSS applications. Anything that can be done to compact and consolidate the OSS stack is good news to operators and should be well received by billing vendors. It also greatly reduces the billing implementation. Note that the press release included comments and support from Amdocs and IBM.
Lastly, the platform will be available for license to other equipment vendors to incorporate their own element APIs. Again, consolidation of network interfaces is of huge value to the service providers, which today deal with myriad inconsistent interfaces to the network core. Also, it greatly simplifies integration. According to Jaakko Aho, head of industry ecosystem development, operations and business software at Nokia Siemens Networks, “Both Cisco and Nokia Siemens are committed to using this platform in their internal development. We believe there is a lot of value in this for the whole industry. We believe that ISVs will benefit, because it will be easier for them to build their applications, and those applications can be used on top of the platform.”
Cisco and Nokia Siemens representatives were very bullish, saying this will help service providers manage the increasing complexity of their networks and, in Aho’s words, “give them a better time to market in terms of introducing new services and technologies and enable them to reduce their costs on OSS deployment and ongoing maintenance.”
I think this is right on the mark. So often in our industry, equipment vendors have just thrown the OSS issues “over the fence” to let operators sort through it. And you can see why, because equipment vendors want to focus their efforts on building great boxes with the best throughput, features, and so on.
Historically, though, that approach has failed, because OSS/BSS integration challenges made it so difficult for operators to turn the new features into services. As a result, the great features were never monetized. That’s a shame, and it hurts the industry.
So, this work is a positive sign that the equipment vendors are taking a leadership role in proactively addressing the OSS/BSS challenges upfront—and not just element management, but also usage processing and service management that are critical for a quality user experience.
This, of course, will be critical for the emerging IP-based services contemplated by operators, as they involve a breadth of network and application infrastructure, cross mobile and fixed networks, and require QoS support from the network. Add it all up, and it is complicated. This new effort may alleviate some of the trouble spots.
Given the powerhouse positions of Cisco and Nokia Siemens in the industry, an open question is whether this work complements or obviates many of the ongoing initiatives in the standards bodies such as the TMF and others. After all, much of the eTOM is about ending the integration nightmare caused by the enormous discontinuity between the network elements and BSS systems. According to Aho, “We believe this is complementary to the standards bodies and their work. A standard is only a good standard when it is adopted, and we believe that, by showing leadership and opening the interfaces and selecting the technology, that will actually drive standards adoption and speed up that process.”
Karen Sage, director of the Network Management Technology Group at Cisco, adds, “We do believe that there is a next-generation evolution that needs to take place to really make this thing work. So what we are trying to do is have both the strength of Nokia Siemens networks and Cisco, and a well rounded base of OSS vendors to drive that continuity.”
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. With Cisco, Nokia, Amdocs and IBM working together, and with the service delivery platforms evolving from the IMS standards and others, the OSS industry now might just have a de facto reference architecture for the 21st century. On the other hand, this is a tough nut to crack. Can Cisco and Nokia Siemens pull it off? Or will this result in yet another smokestack to weigh the industry down? We’ll keep you posted.
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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