Taming the Management Beast

Posted: 08/1999

Taming the Management Beast
By Terry Robinson and Mike Marks

Successfully integrating the systems that enable network service providers to provision
and support their communications services and customers has never been easy–especially
since 1984, when divestiture revolutionized the U.S. telecommunications industry. The
arrival of long distance competition, of course, paid big dividends to consumers in the
form of innovative services, sharply reduced prices and enhanced customer service. In
addition, service providers gained the freedom to choose best-in-class network equipment.

But along with these privileges came fresh challenges to network operators’ abilities
to manage multivendor network elements and support systems, which often were designed with
proprietary formats and interfaces. Service providers also found themselves having to
connect to other providers’ networks running incompatible switches and systems.

Fast forward to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the local loop,
and the current proliferation of Internet-based services, and you can’t help but get a
sense of dij` vu. Multiservice gateways, integrated voice and data services, public
switched telephone network (PSTN) transitions to packet networks and other developments
are layering even more complexity onto network infrastructures and customer care systems.
How can a network operator–particularly a new entrant without decades of
telecommunications experience–keep all these network components in synch?

Growing Reliance on Flexible OSSs

In today’s cutthroat communications environment, the importance of operations support
systems (OSSs)–the information technology infrastructures that enable network operators
to create, deploy and manage their services–is rising. With competition forcing providers
to focus more on customer service, OSSs are evolving to facilitate customer contact and
faster turnaround times in provisioning services and troubleshooting network problems.

"OSSs are becoming a critical enabler for service providers to differentiate
themselves," says Karl Whitelock, program director of Stratecast Partners’ OSS
Competitive Strategies Analysis Service in Denver. "This is because customer service
levels are so closely tied to the effectiveness of these systems."

An important component in the effectiveness of an OSS is the degree to which the
network equipment elements interface to the network management layers of the overall
operations system to feed it important information about the status of network health,
customer usage and facilities availability. Network elements include equipment such as
gateways, switches, routers, multiplexers, channel banks and cross-connects.

The growing reliance on OSSs is reflected in some market forecasts. According to The
Insight Research Corp., a telecommunications market research firm in Parsippany, N.J.,
carrier spending for OSSs will reach $37.8 billion worldwide by 2002, up from $23.6
billion in 1997. This represents a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent.
Insight President Robert Rosenberg notes that at the top of the list of critical success
factors for new-generation network service providers are "OSSs with the flexibility
to meet a service provider’s specific business processes and support the rapid
provisioning of new services."

Data Sharing Lowers Operations Costs

OSSs have been defined differently around the world and during various periods in
history. This random-development approach resulted in many isolated "stovepipe"
systems, which preclude carriers from seeing an overall business operations picture.
However, OSSs are making progress toward standardization. Interfaces such as the Common
Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), for instance, have solidified to enable
various customer management applications to share information and service providers to
better manage their customer bases.

For example, in an ideal scenario, a network operator’s customer care system can share
information with the inventory management, configuration and testing applications. This
enables the OSS to determine whether the necessary facilities are available and in working
order for a requested service, and if so, to provision the service automatically. Such
integrated systems have been long in coming and still are being perfected, but they will
sharply reduce operations costs for providers–a key differentiator in today’s competitive
communications climate. They also help build user satisfaction and loyalty by enabling
providers to deliver upon customer requests quickly and accurately.

"To compete, service providers must be fast, accurate and adaptable," says
consultant Steve Gordon, who heads Minneapolis-based ADC Tele-communications’ OSS
Integration Services division. "It doesn’t really do you any good to ‘turn on’ a
service quickly if the facilities aren’t there to support it or the billing system isn’t
in place to collect for it."

Inventory management is perhaps the most important OSS component for containing
operations costs. "For example, it is common for service providers not to know
whether they have any dark fiber left in the ground and where it is," Gordon notes.
"These service providers wind up rebuying facilities they already have and wasting
money."

Element Management Systems and Interfaces

To accommodate a diverse mix of customers, incumbents and new players are offering a
variety of network access and transport choices, such as wireless, digital subscriber line
(DSL), coaxial cable (cable modem), Internet protocol (IP), asynchronous transfer mode
(ATM) and frame relay services. To carve out their competitive niches, many also are
deploying enhanced services, such as packet telephony, unified messaging and application
hosting. In addition, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are forcing overnight network
and systems integration.

Since the resulting set of disparate network components creates a significant
management challenge, one factor to examine when choosing network infrastructure platforms
is the element management systems that accompany the equipment and their associated
interfaces. Element management systems pass information about the status of network
equipment up through network, service and business operations management layers. This
enables those in charge of running the network to stay on top of network health, capacity
levels and available facilities. The integration of OSSs with network elements enables the
automation of more services, which shortens turnaround time to fill orders and resolve
customer problems. It also lowers costs and reduces the chances of making manual errors.

In some cases, the network equipment vendor may partner with makers of upper layer
carrier-class network management systems and OSS providers to enhance the integration of
the products. Such relationships vastly accelerate the availability of tools to enable the
automation of service provisioning, troubleshooting and other processes, which reduces the
cost of service delivery and the service provider’s ability to respond quickly to
customers.

The key components required in any element manager include fault management,
configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security
management (see table, below). For example, a service provider may have installed a
particular performance monitoring system to measure and maintain service level agreements
(SLAs) struck with customers. It is important, then, that an element management system
accompanying new equipment introduced into the network be able to communicate
performance-related information–such as network uptime, latency, jitter and packet
loss–to the monitoring system.

The "brains" of the OSS is the process control (workflow) manager. It keeps
track of how many steps in a particular process must take place, what actually has been
done and what still needs to be done.

The Automation Benefits of OSSs

Reducing the cost of operations is fundamental to all carrier service strategies,
regardless of whether the carrier has decided to compete with enhanced services or
strictly on cost. Streamlining the business processes necessary to identify and procure
customers; to provision, deliver and maintain services; and to bill for those services
lowers both the costs of those services and the response time necessary to deliver and
maintain them.

OSS integration drives down operations costs through automation. Eliminating manual
handoffs between incompatible systems, avoiding duplication of data entry and providing
ubiquitous access to network and customer information across new and legacy systems
quickly enhances a service provider’s ability to compete.

A 1998 survey of IP virtual private network (VPN) service providers conducted by The
Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm, for example, indicates that operations
accounts for a significant percentage of a carrier’s total cost of ownership (TCO) of new
services that have not been fully automated yet. For new-generation services such as IP
VPNs, operations costs quickly are approaching the required outlay for bandwidth as a
percentage of a network operator’s TCO (see chart, below). Given that bandwidth prices are
dropping and likely will continue to do so, operations costs will be a significant
factor–if not the top factor–in the success of next-generation service providers.

Image: Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown for New-Age IP VPN Services

An important component to OSS development and integration is keeping the various
software components modular, Whitelock notes. This enables customers to mix and match
best-of-breed components. In addition, if the service provider wishes to improve an
application by changing a small piece of source code, a modular approach enables this with
a minimum impact on other pieces of the OSS, he points out.

No Network Is an Island

In building and enhancing effective OSSs, service providers must rely on several
sources. These include integration partnerships among their hardware and software
suppliers and the development of industry-standard interfaces. Customers also can turn to
professional services, such as those mentioned, and to the Tele-Management Forum (www.tmforum.org), an industry organization that promotes
the streamlining and automation of telecommunications business processes. For example, the
forum has designed common models for structuring business operations in an effort to
enhance interprovider compatibility and prevent carriers from having to "reinvent the
wheel."

Together, these industry efforts are enabling the evolution of OSSs from systems that
simply manage networks to tools that empower service providers also to manage their
customers–and their futures.

Terry Robinson is director of network management product management and Mike Marks
is senior product manager in 3Com Corp.’s Carrier Systems Group, Santa Clara, Calif. They
can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]
and [email protected]