IP: INTELLIGENT PROVISIONING
BY TERRY
SWEENEY
VPNs OF 1,000 SITES. VOICE AND VIDEO OVER IP. E-COMMERCE TRANSACTIONS
THAT OVERLOAD THE FULFILLMENT AND CREDIT DEPARTMENTS. THERE ARE
HUGE OPPORTUNITIES FOR PROVIDERS TO CAPTURE THE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH
OF NEW SERVICES ON IP NETWORKSEXCEPT NONE OF ITS
WORTH MUCH IF YOU LACK PROVISIONING, BILLING AND MANAGEMENT RESOURCES INSIDE THE EVER-EXPANDING IP CLOUD.
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hether youre an established carrier or a new service provider,
IP service management poses enormous challenges: achieving for IP the same functions that OSSs have delivered reliably
for yearsservice provisioning, performance reporting, fault
detection and isolation, and capturing all the requisite billing
data. The strategic objective: penetrating new markets or industry segments
and deriving profitable new flows of revenue. OSSs for IP networks and functions must point the way toward a larger bottom line.
Carriers and service providers realize the smartest way to achieve business imperatives is to make sure their OSS can perform Intelligent
Provisioning. The building blocks of this new IP resemble existing OSSs that
manage elements, networks, services and business processes. But the new
IP support systems are significantly different from the old OSSs. They dont
rely on monolithic, single-vendor solutions. They sport open application program interfaces (APIs) at multiple levels to encourage all manner of thirdparty developers. And multiple partnerships and alliances ensure that customers can choose the products they consider best-of-breed with the assurances that they will work together.
This evolved business model is what prompted Orchestream,
Micromuse, Portal and CrossKeys to jointly develop these piece-parts.
Carriers and service providers can select or exploit the functions they need
to derive immediate revenue. Over time, they can also add from the vendors partners, which include NARUS (Palo Alto), TIBCO (Palo Alto), Vitria
(Sunnyvale) and Ciscos Communications Software Group (San Jose),
among other application, device and element management partners.
But havent service providers heard all the promises of integrated OSS
solutions before? Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) was to usher in a
new era of openness more than 10 years ago. Market dynamics have
changed dramatically since then; today everyone has incentive to build
integrated network management systems.
PROBLEM: A service provider using MPLS is managing the network topology on paper and reconfiguring routers by hand.
SOLUTION: Automate network discovery functions, with
up-to-date views of network
topology and functions.
BENEFITS:
Micromuse is a
IP-based VPNs can be provispecialist in fault mansioned automatically.
agement, and OrchesEasier to manage QoS as a
function of VPNs.
tream is a specialist
in IP provisioning,
says Marianne Costigan, EMEA business development
manager for Micromuse. Together we enable service
providers to deliver services in a reliable, profitable way.
They want to be able to choose the best, deploy it with
their other solutions and not be bound by a single vendor.
We think of it as integrated IP service activation, or intelligent provisioning. Services are activated,
monitored and checked for faults, and they can be changed
from a single point, says Richard Muirhead, senior vice
president of technology solutions at Orchestream.
Done correctly, Intelligent Provisioning can improve
time-to-market with new services or translate to better
use of personnel. And as bandwidth pricing continues to
erode, service providers will need the added value of
Intelligent Provisioning to differentiate themselves.
Consider these scenarios as harbingers of how service
networks are evolving.
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ble. Conversely, automating MPLS brings many benefits (see
New Services, No Sweat).
Orchestream automates the discovery of the network,
using the discovered information to create sites. Once
created, it is a simple matter of dragging and dropping
them into a VPNsince Orchestream automatically
pushes the configuration down to the network. Portals
billing system could take a new customer order and pass
the details to Orchestreams API to fully automate the
service activation process, says Jean-Louis Arsenault,
manager of alliances at Portal.
As a result, provisioning a whole VPN is slashed from
Automating MPLS
two days to just five minutes. Errors due to manual conFor a service provider, deploying multiprotocol label figurations are also reduced, and key network manageswitching (MPLS) for activating VPNs manually has signif- ment personnel can then be redirected to handle strateicant limitations;
gic tasks as opposed to
PROBLEM:
A
service
provider
with
IP-based
VPNs
wants
to
add
SLAs
for
it is time consumidentifying
occasional
customers that tap VPNs for remote access, intranet and extranet applications.
ing, error prone
alarms, which may be
and not very flexiunrelated to service levels.
SOLUTION: Integrate fault, configuration and performance management systems.
BENEFITS:
Faults are now associated directly
with affected VPNs.
More detailed reporting on SLA
adherence means performance
can be measured on a VPNspecific basis.
The network can be managed at
a service level.
New services or modifications
can be added with a mouse
click, automatically updating
fault and performance management systems.
Virtual SLAs
A U.K. service provider,
Energis, wants to introduce
IP-based VPNs but is looking for a way to include
SLAs so that its customers
can measure specific application performance and
availability against predetermined thresholds (see
Virtually Guaranteed).
Our customers need
this advanced functionality, so it makes sense for us to
integrate best-of-breed software, says Keith Duncan,
