Teleca - OSS For Network Operators - Mentions Service Robots - Apr02

OSS Solutions for Network Operators –
white paper, 2002

WHITE PAPER
Prepared: Lars Andersson April 2002 For open distribution
Approved: Doc. No. B001834 Rev. C
OSS Solutions for Network Operators –

white paper 2002
oss white paper_c.doc

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Contents
1 Introduction ____________________________________________________________ 6
1.1 About the document....................................................................................................... 6
1.2 The content .................................................................................................................... 6
1.3 About the intended reader.............................................................................................. 7
2 Multi-Service Networks___________________________________________________ 8
2.1 Market background ........................................................................................................ 8
2.2 The broadband multi-service network ........................................................................... 9
2.3 The services and applications ...................................................................................... 10
2.4 The access technologies............................................................................................... 11
2.5 The backbone network................................................................................................. 14
2.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 14
3 The realm of OSS_______________________________________________________ 15
3.1 Overview...................................................................................................................... 15
3.1.1 TMN architecture ............................................................................................. 15
3.1.2 The TMForum process map.............................................................................. 17
3.1.3 Our summarised view....................................................................................... 18
3.2 Element Managers ....................................................................................................... 20
3.3 Planning and Administration ....................................................................................... 22
3.3.1 General ............................................................................................................. 22
3.3.2 Inventory Management..................................................................................... 22
3.3.3 Workforce Management ................................................................................... 23
3.3.4 Decision Support .............................................................................................. 23
3.4 Service Provisioning .................................................................................................... 24
3.4.1 General ............................................................................................................. 24
3.4.2 Order Managers ................................................................................................ 25
3.4.3 Workflow systems ............................................................................................ 25
3.4.4 Provisioning engines......................................................................................... 26
3.4.5 Network Provisioning....................................................................................... 26
3.4.6 Summary........................................................................................................... 26
3.5 Service Assurance........................................................................................................ 28
3.5.1 General ............................................................................................................. 28
3.5.2 Alarm handling ................................................................................................. 28
3.5.3 Performance Management ................................................................................ 29
3.5.4 Trouble Ticketing – Workflow......................................................................... 30
3.5.5 End-to-end monitoring; Service Robots ........................................................... 30
3.5.6 Summary overview........................................................................................... 31
3.5.7 Service Level Management .............................................................................. 31
3.5.8 Policy-based Networking.................................................................................. 32
3.6 Billing .......................................................................................................................... 33
3.6.1 General ............................................................................................................. 33
3.6.2 Architecture overview ...................................................................................... 33
3.6.3 Mediation.......................................................................................................... 34
3.6.4 Micro-payment ................................................................................................. 35
3.6.5 Rating and Billing............................................................................................. 36
3.6.6 Interconnect Billing .......................................................................................... 37
3.6.7 Sample configuration........................................................................................ 37
3.7 Customer (Self) Care (CRM)....................................................................................... 39
3.7.1 General ............................................................................................................. 39
3.7.2 The products ..................................................................................................... 40
3.8 Integration Framework ................................................................................................ 41
OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 3 (52)

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3.8.1 General ............................................................................................................. 41

3.8.2 The “total solution” .......................................................................................... 41
3.8.3 Point-to-point integration ................................................................................. 41
3.8.4 Integration Framework ..................................................................................... 42
3.8.5 Current experiences .......................................................................................... 44
4 Market analysis ________________________________________________________ 45
4.1 Technology & standards .............................................................................................. 45
4.2 ISVs ............................................................................................................................. 46
4.3 Systems Integrators...................................................................................................... 46
4.4 Equipment Suppliers.................................................................................................... 46
5 Recommendations ______________________________________________________ 48
5.1 Select your OSS strategy ............................................................................................. 48
5.1.1 Own development............................................................................................. 48
5.1.2 The “total solution” .......................................................................................... 48
5.1.3 Best-of-breed products ..................................................................................... 49
5.1.4 Integration Framework & Solutions ................................................................. 49
5.2 Define your partner strategy ........................................................................................ 50
5.3 General hints................................................................................................................ 50

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About the author and the company
Lars Andersson has been active in the IT industry since 1970, and he has been working for AU-
System since 1983. He currently holds a position as CTO at the OSS competence center within the
Teleca group. He can be reached via email lars.andersson@ausystem.se.
In February 2002 AU-System merged with Teleca. The merger creates one of Europe's leading
high-end consulting groups focused on new technology and R&D. The group has more than 2,200
employees in 13 countries, with a strong presence in the Nordic region, UK and France.
Teleca is a world-class supplier of software engineering services for advanced systems, electronic
equipment and applications. Our business concept is to strengthen our customer's market position
and time-to-market. This is achieved by providing professional teams with specialist technical
expertise, working in partnership with development-intensive companies worldwide.
Teleca is listed on the O-list of the Stockholm Exchange.
Copyright statement
 2002, Teleca AB, Stockholm, Sweden
All rights reserved. This document is protected by copyright.
No part of this document may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written
authorisation by Teleca.

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1 Introduction
OSS means Operations Support Systems. It will be used throughout this document to denote “all
the support systems required to run a Network Operator business”, including the Business Support
Systems (BSS).
A Network Operator we define to be a Communication Service Provider who has a network

infrastructure and provides multiple services on top of that. It could be a transport network, a
fixed-line access network of any kind or a mobile 2/2.5/3G mobile network. We also believe that
most of the OSS issues raised in this white paper are relevant to Service and Content Providers,
without any infrastructure of their own. However, these actors face a simpler task, since they only
manage services and IT infrastructure, and some of the products described in the document are not
relevant for them.
This is a white paper covering the area of OSS. The purpose is to give a tutorial on the subject and
to describe some of the trends that we are observing. Furthermore the document provides an
overview of most of the market leading products around, and makes an attempt to position them in
relation to each other. The document aims to answer questions like:
• What is OSS all about, what functional scope does it cover?

• There are so many products around, and they all seem to do just everything. What is the truth,
and which product do I need for what purpose?
• What is happening in the industry, and how do I avoid falling in the pitfalls that are already
discovered by others?
• How do I relate to all the players in the industry – the Equipment Suppliers, the Independent
Software Vendors and the Systems Integrators? Who does what?
Finally a set of recommendations on how to define an OSS strategy is given for the target
organisation – the Network Operator.
1.1 About the document

This white paper was produced during the Q1 2001 time frame. It comprises information of
various types and from different sources:
• Material from traditional OSS-related standards and industry fora, ITU (TMN), IETF (SNMP)
and TMForum.
• The observations from the OSS industry during the past 10 years.
• Personal judgements from the author are interspersed throughout the text.
• Product positioning is performed based on information collected from the web and during
meetings with product company representatives.
To summarise, the sources vary, and they as well as the interpretations may not always be entirely
correct. And even if it was correct at some time, it may have become obsolete quickly. So please
accept this document to be what it is – a subjective snapshot of the OSS world. If you as a reader
want to forward your views and corrections to the author, please do, they may be included in an
updated version!
1.2 The content

The document is comprised of the subsequently numbered sections:

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1. This is the beforehand introductory section.
2. Here we attempt to describe what a Multi-Service Network is, and what services that are
normally provided on top of it.
3. This is the main section. It is a tutorial on what we believe OSS is all about. By describing the
main Network Operator processes, and how they interrelate to each other, and giving samples
of the most widely used products on the market, we aim to give a state-of-the-art crash course
in OSS.
4. In this section we summarise the generic trends we are currently observing in the industry,
both from a technical perspective and for each type of player.
5. Finally, we give a set of recommendations for the target organisation, the Network Operator.
1.3 About the intended reader

The intended reader of this document is the senior architect or technical manager (CTO) at the
Network Operator, who is responsible for some or all areas of OSS. Presumably the reader also
has an impact on business and service development and the IT support required to accomplish it.
The reader is expected to be familiar with the acronyms and the jargon commonly used with the IT
and OSS community.

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2 Multi-Service Networks
The communications industry is moving towards a world where we can communicate anywhere
and anytime. It is a world where we can be “always on ”, without the hassle of waiting to be
connected. It is a world where easy and effortless communications, based on mobility and
personalized services increases quality-of-life, productivity and enables a more resource efficient
world through freedom of choice. This vision of a communicating world implies drastic
developments in telecommunication technologies, infrastructures and services.
The emerging broadband multi-service networks and 3G enabled mobile networks will create
exciting new possibilities. Users will get faster and more convenient access to services and
applications, helping them to enlighten and entertain them and to become more productive. Service
Providers will get much more effective channels to reach the most attractive part of their customer
base with new services and applications. They also face the challenges of changing business logic
and intensified competition.
The scope of this document is the emerging broadband multi-service networks – IP-centric
(Internet Protocol) networks with fixed and wireless (broadband) access and high-bandwidth real-
time service capabilities.
2.1 Market background

The communications industry is on the verge of a fundamental transformation. By the middle of
this decade the Mobile Internet and broadband multi-service networks will be global mass-market
phenomenon. They will have become the dominant paradigms for all further mainstream
development of electronic communications.
This transformation will come as a result of a number of communication megatrends.
• The phenomenal growth of mobile telephony and its expansion from voice services to the
Mobile Internet that will bring the Internet into the pocket of the user and create a new world
of personalized, info-centric, always-on and always-with-you services.
• The extraordinary growth of the Internet and IP services and applications.
• The large volumes of new mobile telephones and devices shipped every year – more than 500
million in 2001 –and wireless enabled communicating PCs, cars and appliances; bringing ever
more powerful communicating devices in the hands and the homes of the users.
• The compelling case for B2B e-business.
• New technologies and standards enabling affordable broadband access and, eventually, all-IP
multi-service networking.
• Network convergence, moving from vertically integrated “single ”-service networks to open,
horizontally layered, IP-centric multi-service networks.
• Intensified competition and specialization driven by deregulation and globalization.
These trends are driven by the large investments in current and future business opportunities
enabled by the rapid development of digital technologies. Technology is and will always remain
the great enabler. But the success of new technologies will be entirely dependent on the industry ’s
ability to create devices and services that are embraced by the users. Thus, the ongoing
transformation also involves a shift to an increasingly user driven market place.

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2.2 The broadband multi-service network

Up till now the communications networks are autonomously implemented, and each type provides
a different set of services, as illustrated in figure 1 below:
Today’s Solutions
Data (FR, etc..)

PSTN/ISDN
Cell ul ar Mobile
Mobile
CATV
Figure 1; Today’s networks providing different services
The architecture for the next generation networks is described in figure 2 below. Here we find a
number of horizontal network layers, each with a distinctly unique purpose. We also find that the
connectivity service is separated from the end-user services.

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Applications/
Content Servers
Communication Telephony
applications & Mobility
services
Telephony Messaging Positioning
control Mobile
Mobile data VoIP PMR/SMR
telephony
Connectivity Other
IP/Multi-Service
Networks
Multi-service Core Network Other
Telephony
Networks
Access
Access
Access
Mobile CATV
Fixed
Clients
Figure 2; The architecture for next generation networks
The broadband multi-service network corresponds to the fixed parts of the network, i.e. the fixed
access, the backbone network and the related service control and media gateways. However, from
an OSS perspective we can include the wireless access network also.
2.3 The services and applications

Broadband multi-service networks will be capable of supporting a wide range of services:
High Speed Internet access
From the users ’point of view, High Speed Internet access is the early defining service of the
(fixed access) broadband multi-service network. From a transmission technology point of view,
broadband is most commonly defined as 1.5 to 2 Mbps or more.
Dial-up Internet access
Dial-up Internet access originating from PSTN/ISDN circuit switched access, will be an important
service in all broadband multi-service networks involving migration from legacy telephony
networks.
Classical telephony
Classical telephony will for a long time remain a key service because of its large user base
revenues. Service providers with a large customer base in classical telephony will hesitate to risk
the integrity of their service. Nevertheless, over time users will increasingly migrate to mobile and
IP telephony alternatives for their voice communications.
IP telephony
The early successes of IP telephony have been based on cost and pricing advantages derived from
uneven regulations rather than inherent technology efficiencies. Nevertheless, IP telephony will
successively grow its share of the telephony service market.

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Increasing investments in development of IP technology and services will enable the new,
multimedia based IP telephony services to mature and benefit from economy of scale. This will in
turn enable service providers to move to multi-service network platforms and offer attractively
priced separate or packaged IP telephony services.
Access to mobile services
First-feet radio technologies such as Bluetooth and WLANs provide a means to connect devices
wirelessly to network access points in homes, offices and suitable public places. These open
possibilities for service providers to cost effectively extend the market for and usage of mobile
services, by means of IP tunneling through fixed access multi-service networks. The benefit for
users would be the convenience of using one ’s personal mobile devices and services also when
physically stationary in such locations.
Mobile networks like GSM 2G, 2.5G and 3G enable users to seamlessly access telephony and
Mobile Internet services throughout the world.
Video and other streaming services
Broadband multi-service networks will open up new means for access and distribution of
streaming services such as broadcast and interactive video, radio programming and music, etc. An
example is “Personal TV ”,i.e. a flexible personal selection of channels and programs from a much
larger base of channels than what is normally available to the consumer over cable or satellite.
Such services will be among the most demanding in throughput and traffic loading of the network,
thus requiring appropriate feature for efficient handling. They will also require powerful, yet
simple tools for consumers to conveniently select and control channel or program viewing.
Application services and access
Application Service Providers (ASPs) is a new industry set to take off and grow, very much
enabled by and in synergy with broadband multi-service networks. It is also an example of a
business that some existing service providers are interested in expanding into to be able to offer
packages of application and access services to enterprises.
Leased lines, Frame Relay and IP-VPNs
Existing Leased Line and Frame Relay services can be expected to remain for a considerable time
as many enterprises will not replace their end equipment just to change connectivity service.
Broadband multi-service networks can carry such legacy site-to-site connectivity services over
ATM.
IP-VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)are becoming an attractive alternative. IP-VPNs basically

provide tunneled connections through IP networks. The main benefits brought by IP-VPNs are the
availability of global connectivity, shorter TTS (Time To Service)and a better potential for price
reductions, as IP is in the mainstream of investments and development.
Enterprise access & local services
SMEs and enterprise branch offices typically require a mix of many service types. A straight-
forward solution is an enterprise access router interfacing the intra-site facilities with service
provider IP services.
2.4 The access technologies

Mobile networks like GSM 2G, 2.5G and 3G enable users to seamlessly access telephony and
Mobile Internet services throughout the world.

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There are also a number of different technologies capable of providing broadband access to
enterprises and residential users. Each of the technologies have their main field of application,
based on how their respective characteristics fit with different service provider situations and
target customer communication demographics. Thus the different technologies complement each
other to enable different types of service providers to compete.
Fiber to the office
Fiber systems with SDH/SONET are already widely used in both incumbent and new access
providers ’access networks. The typical applications are:
• fiber to the office, to larger enterprise sites,
• access network feeder and transport in metropolitan areas, providing a platform for the use of
other technologies for the subscriber drop.
The penetration of fiber systems in access networks will increase over time driven by the rapid
overall growth of bandwidth demand. Fiber will be driven by its near limitless bandwidth enabling
service providers to do a single physical installation/construction, and then handle the growth
through CPE changes. Some service providers will want to own their own transport facilities;
other will specialize in the role as carriers, offering both dark and lit fiber and other transport
services.
DSL
DSL covers a number of technologies for broadband access over existing copper cables.
Asymmetric solutions, ADSL, provide higher bandwidth downstream than upstream. Primarily
intended for residential use, the technology typically enables up to 8 Mbps downstream, and up to
about 1 Mbps upstream, both depending on distance and copper cable quality. In practice, standard
services typically offer lower speeds for consistency and reach.
Symmetric High speed solutions, SHDSL, are primarily intended for SOHOs and SMEs. The
introduction of a global standard, g.shdsl, should fuel a rapid build-out as local loop unbundling
opens up for competition in the copper access area.
VDSL provides Very high bandwidth and is considered for two applications, residential access and
“extended Ethernet reach ”in campus and building networks Residential users will benefit from a
capacity enabling delivery of multiple digital video streams.
VoDSL refers to the technology enabling voice services to be transported over a DSL network
access by means of with ATM cells or IP packets. The functionality is implemented in a Voice
Gateway and a terminal supporting data access plus a number of voice lines.
As a technology for providing broadband access over existing copper cables, DSL is an obvious
alternative for incumbent operators. However, with local loop unbundling, giving other service
providers access to the copper, interest in DSL is no longer strictly limited to the incumbents. DSL
has now started to be deployed as a mass-market broadband access solution.
Cable modems
Cable modems is the alternative for cable operators to offer High Speed Internet access, IP
telephony and other services. They can thereby expand their business and increase revenues.
DOCSIS standard cable modems is now a rapidly growing market in North America. Europe is
lagging behind, partly because of a more unclear standards situation.
Cable modems typically provide a bandwidth of about 10 Mbps downstream and a couple of Mbps
upstream. As cable basically is shared medium, throughput per user depends on how many are

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using the network. When cable network becomes fully loaded capacity can be extended by
partitioning.
Fiber to multiple tenant buildings
State-of-the-art IT and communication facilities are increasingly seen as a competitive factor in

housing and city development. By providing a local broadband communication infrastructure,
property developers can increase the attractiveness of their property to tenants; residential as well
as SOHOs and SMEs. The infrastructure can also carry IT support for housing services, such as
security, energy management and key handling.
Fiber is a competitive alternative to provide broadband access to the buildings of such clusters of
residential and enterprise users. The last drop inside the buildings to the individual flats or offices
would typically be Ethernet over copper or fiber. Fiber is becoming economically feasible with
new low cost installation techniques, in particular, when considering future needs for very high
bandwidth services, such as video.
Wireless broadband access - LMDS
LMDS (Local Multi-Distribution Systems) are wireless high capacity point-to-multi-point

systems, typically operating in frequency bands in the 20-45 Ghz range. Wireless broadband
systems of the LMDS type are a suitable alternative for:
• mobile operators looking to expand into fixed access business services, and
• access providers moving into new markets with broadband business services.
Wireless broadband access – BWLL
BWLL (Broadband Wireless Local Loop) will be a wireless alternative to deliver hi access.
Depending on standardization and licensing, BWLL systems will typically operate at around 3.5
GHz or in other bands below 10 GHz.
The typical service provider profile would be a competitive Internet Service Provider targeting
high-end residential users, SOHOs and low end SMEs. For incumbent service providers, BWLL
can also be a complement to deliver broadband access to customers outside the reach of DSL.
Wireless LAN
Wireless LAN (WLAN) is primarily a technology for intra-site high-bandwidth wireless access. It
is also a possible unlicensed wireless broadband access alternative for hot-spot locations with high
concentrations of roaming business users, such as airports. WLAN thereby can become an
effective complement to 3G mobile and fixed access broadband networks.
Being a wireless solution, WLAN provides degree of local mobility. Nevertheless, it is basically
more of a technology for very high speed wireless portability and access to fixed broadband packet
networks.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth brings convenient personal connectivity to users, by providing wireless inter-connection

of communicating devices. As short range indoor wireless technique for connection to network
access points, Bluetooth also complements fixed access techniques.
For example, with a Bluetooth enabled wireless home or office base station, users will be able to
connect their personal mobile devices also to the broadband network for access to mobile services.
Such a Bluetooth home base station, will eventually serve as a wireless micro-LAN, enhancing the
usability of the broadband access by providing local mobility and access for personal devices. It

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would also support easy installation and access for the many communicating devices of the future
intelligent homes.
2.5 The backbone network

The backbone network consists of a packet backbone running on top of transmission facilities.
Current transmission networks typically use SDH/SONET over fiber. The move to ATM and IP
will increasingly remove the need for SDH/SONET.
Optical networking
Optical networking over fiber systems is the physical transport foundation of broadband networks.
Bandwidth demand and supply develops at a much higher pace than the celebrated Moore ’s law
for microelectronics. This is made possible by the advances in DWDM (Dense Wavelength
Division Multiplexing) technology, that enable capacity to be multiplied by transmitting multiple
“colors ”, or wavelengths of light, over a single fiber.
At the trunk level the front line is to achieve Terabit transmission. At the metro level the challenge
is more to provide the means for effective engineering of capacity deployment and allocation. At
the access level cost effectiveness is the key concern.
Advances in IP technology will enable cost savings by running IP directly on optical systems.
Optical line interface standards are not sufficiently defined to guarantee interoperability of line
systems from different vendors.
The packet backbone network
A packet-switched backbone capable of handling and scaling a wide variety and services is a key
foundation for any broadband multi-service network. A multi-service packet backbone networks
must be capable of handling different types of traffic with widely differing characteristics, e.g.:
• real-time traffic for person-to-person communication

• Internet traffic
• enterprise communications
• video and voice streaming.
It must deliver true carrier-class resiliency and serviceability, and support powerful IP border
routing for peering with other IP networks and to migrate gracefully without degrading existing
services. Multi-service packet backbone networks also need to support advanced quality of service
and network engineering features, and operate with comprehensive, unifying management
architecture.
2.6 Conclusion
From the above walk-through of the subject we conclude that “multi-service networks” is a vast
area of communication products and technologies, that all combined aim to provide a solution
capable of delivering a unified set of end-user services, irrespective of the user’s locality, his
device and the access technology.
The challenge to manage and operate the “beast” is of course immense. If we also add the
complexity of multi-vendor networks and a complex new-economy world of providers and clients
in an ever-expanding value chain, it does not get any simpler. Please proceed to the next section!

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3 The realm of OSS

3.1 Overview
The tasks of administering a set of services, and the infrastructure, on which they are based, are
some of the major challenges of a Network Operator. It involves recruiting a good group of
people, organising the work into efficient processes and to set-up the IT systems required to
support them - and all this in a limited period of time. In this section we will discuss some of the
problems, solutions and principles that apply to this area, which is often referred to as Support
Systems, Operations & Maintenance, OSS/BSS or Telecom Management. We hereafter refer to it
as OSS (Operations Support Systems).
3.1.1 TMN architecture

As can be understood, the OSS area is huge, and several attempts to slice it into understandable
pieces exist. One, which has gained a general acceptance, is the TMN (Telecommunications
Management Network) model M.3100 by ITU. They introduced the “TMN pyramid” where the
management is divided into a number of layers, as illustrated in figure 3 below:
Business
Management
Service
Management
Network
Management
Element
Management
Network
Elements
Figure 3; The TMN “pyramid”
The meaning of the layers is described below. Please note that each layer is dependent on the
services provided by the adjacent layer below:
Network Elements Networking equipment; the single boxes, servers, etc. that
constitute a single resource.
Element Management The management functionality that is required to operate a

single piece of equipment.
Network Management When multiple network elements are interconnected they form
a network. An end-to-end connection or a telephone call uses a
set of network resources. Network Management refers to the
functionality required to control the network.

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Service Management The network provides services. A leased line subscription, an

email account and a telephone subscription are a few examples.
The Service management refers to the controlling of these
services.
Business Management The services are provided to subscribers (customers). The

customer management and related issues like billing is referred
to as Business Management.
The strength of the TMN model is that it provides the capability to reach a level of abstraction that
is increased through the layers. Ideally there is no need for interference between layers that are not
adjacent. Another contribution from the TMN model is the division of management functionality
into a number of functional areas, the FCAPS model:
Fault Management Handling of alarms.
Configuration Installing and configuring the object in questions, be it a

Management service or a physical port.
Accounting Management The creation and mediation of resource usage data and
the subsequent rating and billing of the service usage.
Performance The creation, collection and aggregation of statistics

Management related to resource usage. The creation and handling of
reports related to the collected statistics.
Security Management All aspects related to security of the management

functionality. The area spans from authentication of the
operators to access control, i.e. who is allowed to do
what, when, from where.
Note that the FCAPS model and the TMN pyramid are complementary, as depicted in the figure 4
below. The functional areas are applicable to all layers. An example – an error condition on a
physical port (network element layer) is a service interruption (service management layer) which is
a customer problem report and possibly a discount on the next bill (business management layer).
F C A P S
BM
SM
NM
EM
NE
Figure 4; The FCAPS model defined by the TMN standard

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3.1.2 The TMForum process map

A good overview of what the OSS world really is intended to cover is provided by the organisation
TMForum, via the process overview Telecom Operations Map (TOM). It contains a detailed
description of the most important processes involved in running a Network Operator operation. In
the figure 5 below a graphical presentation of TOM is provided, and an online “clickable” version
is available at www.tmforum.org/clickmap/tomv2.1/index.htm.
Customer
Customer Interface Management Process
Order Problem Customer Invoicing/

Sales QoS
Handling Handling Collection
Management
Customer Care Processes
Information
Service Service Service
Service Rating and Systems
Planning/ Problem Quality
Configuration Discounting Management
Development Resolution Management
Processes
Service/Product Development and Operations Processes
Network Network Network

Network Network Data
Planning/ Inventory Maintenance
Provisioning Management
Development Management & Restoration
Network and Systems Management Processes
Physical Network and Information Technology
Figure 5; The Telecom Operations Map (TOM) provided by TMForum

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3.1.3 Our summarised view

In order to simplify the continued discussion throughout the document, we have summarised
TOM, the Network Operators’ network infrastructure as described in the previous section and the
required OSS systems into the figure 6 below:
Customer Care
Planning &
Administration
Service
Assurance Billing
Multi Service
Provisioning
Element
Managers
Servers & IT
Infrastructure IP / ATM / FR Network Access
Network
Transport Network
Figure 6; Our summarised view of the OSS realm
The main objects found in the figure are:
• A network infrastructure; this will often be comprised of a variety of network technologies

from different vendors. Some portion of the network capacity is often rented from another
Network Operator.
• A set of server platforms provides some of the value-added services like web hosting or email,
i.e. the services above the connectivity services. These services often interact with each other
and they together form what is sometimes referred to as the Service Network.
• Element Managers, one or several per network technology and server platform. The Element
Managers are used to set-up, configure, provision, monitor (status and performance), operate,
test, etc. the equipment.
• The main (groups of) processes that are performed by the Network Operator. These are:
• Planning and Administration; to plan, design and administrate the services and the
infrastructure.
• Multi-Service Provisioning; to activate instances of services for particular customers.
• Service Assurance; to monitor and uphold the quality of the delivered services.

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• Billing; to charge for the services.
• Customer Care; to provide an interface to the customers for all issues related to sales,
ordering, problem handling and billing of the services.
In the remainder of this section, each of these areas will be covered. Each of the five main
processes will be explored ands broken down into components and information flows. For each
component the market-leading products found to cover the required functionality will be
described.

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3.2 Element Managers

The Element Managers (EM) are proprietary solutions developed and provided by the equipment
vendors themselves. However, referring to the discussion above about the TMN layers, this is a
very misleading name.
Element Managers normally address the entire FCAPS scope, to the extent that is applicable to the
services provided by the networking equipment. They also cover several of the TMN layers, from
the Element layer up to the Network and sometimes the Service Management layers. This also
means that they are involved in supporting all of the major processes referred to above. That is, the
Element Managers do have to provide functionality for Service Assurance, Service Provisioning,
Planning and Accounting. Hence, what we in this section describe as the Element Manager is
normally a very complex and comprehensive type of management systems. The limitation in scope
is that they address only the areas applicable to the specific type of equipment.
Some Equipment Suppliers tend to make their Element Managers generic and claim that they
possess multi-vendor capabilities. This we believe is unfortunate, since we have never seen that
one Equipment Vendor in the long-term can handle all the interfaces required for successful
management of his competitors’ equipment.
A significant portion of the Element Manager functionality is nowadays often embedded within
the NE (Network Element) itself. Other parts, that address the Network and Service Management
layers, are often based on commercially available platforms like Windows NT or Unix. A common
notion is to refer to them as “Network Element Management Systems” or “Sub-Network
Managers”.
What about Element Managers for the Servers and IT infrastructure? Well, here we find tools and
methods from the enterprise world. They manage configuration and monitoring of NT and Unix
servers, applications, databases, hubs and routers. MIB polling, intercepting log files, proprietary
agents, system and database administrator applications etc. are some of the techniques that are
being used for managing the IT infrastructure.
In order to enable easy plug-in of the Element Manager(s) into a Network Operator’s OSS
environment, the requirements for integration capabilities on the EM are high. They are expected
to provide well-defined interfaces to forward alarms, to retrieve performance data, to allow
services to be provisioned etc. Few Element Managers are built in this open way, so this is an
important evaluation criterion. The concept of IRPs (Integration Reference Points), as a method to
describe standardised interfaces, has recently been introduced. Some of the common integration
points are illustrated in the figure 7 below:

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Customer Care
Planning &
Administration
Service
Assurance Billing
Multi Service
Provisioning
Element
F C A P Manager
Network
Elements
Figure 7; The Element Managers and how the integrate into the Network Operator’s environment
In the figure the arrows represent:
• Alarms originated in the Fault Management component of the Element Manager being
forwarded to the Service Assurance components.
• Accounting data being sent to the Account and Billing area of the OSS space.
• Performance statistics which is retrieved by the Service Assurance component.
• Service Activation orders that are sent from the Multi Service Provisioning area to the
Configuration Management part of the Element Manager.
• Configuration and topology data that is uploaded by the Planning and Administration area
from the Element Manager’s Configuration Management part.
• It should also be noted that the need for integrated Security Management aspects is seldom
supported.
From the Network Operators perspective the Element Managers are often seen as useful and
necessary tools, to be used for configuration and trouble-shooting activities. They may become a
complicating factor when there are often many of them, since they are difficult to master because
they do not provide a uniform user interface.
When a Network Operator only has one or a few network technologies in place, he sometimes
bases his OSS solution solely on the Element Managers and a Billing system.

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3.3 Planning and Administration
3.3.1 General
This is an important and often neglected part of a Network Operator’s processes. To administer
and keep track of what he has in terms of equipment and services, and to make intelligent
forecasting and planning are efforts that very quickly give a return on investment.
Once a decision has been taken to add equipment, it has to be ordered, installed, configured and
prepared for service provisioning. Preferably it should be possible to schedule services already
when the equipment is ordered. Also the activities to actually send out an engineer has to be
managed.
3.3.2 Inventory Management

To keep track of the equipment—where it is, how it is configured, its status (like planned, ordered,
in operation - an Inventory system is needed. Until recently this Inventory component was often
considered to be “off-line”, and it was more a tool for the planning and purchasing department,
than the operations staff.
However, in order to increase the quality of the data in the system, and to minimise the
administrative burden of re-keying data, this component more and more is being put on-line, with
a direct connection to the underlying Element Managers, including an ability to upload the current
configuration. As such an Inventory system also has an increased value as a repository of the
production network.
The Inventory Management component is often used in the execution of several other processes as
well. A few examples are:
1. In the pre-provisioning process, e.g. a router could be added to the Inventory and marked as
“planned”. It then may be enabled for scheduled service provisioning. Once the equipment
arrives a work-order is created to assist the service engineer in the installation process.
2. During provisioning the Inventory is used to find a free resource. The resource is activated for
the service, and it is marked “in use” in the Inventory.
3. The Inventory is used by the Service Assurance components to find the service and customer
impact of a fault.
To summarise, the Inventory is used to support the planning, administration and forecasting
activities within the Network Operator organisation. The Inventory is involved in information
exchange with components residing in the Service Provisioning and Service Assurance processes,
as well as the network itself.
The aspects described above are sometimes also referred to as “Inside Plant Network”
management. In addition to this we have the “Outside Plant Network”, which is composed of
ducts, cables, masts, city maps, etc. Here the GIS (Geographical Information System) aspects are
important – to locate an object to a specific set of co-ordinates. For some Network Operators with
a complex infrastructure it is very important to keep a good record of this information. Some
Operators have two separate systems, while others have one.
Some of the vendors and their products in this area are listed below. Their support for Outside
Plant Networks and GIS vary:
• Granite; and their product Xpercom

• Cramer; Dimension

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• GE; Smallworld
• Arkipelago; Rome
• Incatel; NIMS
• Visionael; ServiceBase
Other vendors of Inventory systems are Telcordia, Eftia and Metasolv.
3.3.3 Workforce Management

Once it has been decided to perform a manual operation within the network it is essential to keep
track of its progress. This involves steps like selecting a suitable sub-contractor, assigning the
work-order to him, ensure that he is equipped with proper spare parts and ensure that he reports
back the result of the operation in due time. The area is called Workforce Management, and it is
covered by a multitude of products. Often the software support is found within the Inventory
Management components described above, but it can also be covered by traditional workflow
systems.
3.3.4 Decision Support

To cover a variety of planning purposes the Operators nowadays utilise data warehouse
technologies to gather statistics from a variety of sources (like other OSS components and the
network technologies) and produce reports. The area is sometimes referred to as Decision Support.
In the figure 8, below the components within Planning and Administration are visualised:
Planning
and Administration Customer Care
Workforce
Inventory
Management Service
workorder
Assurance Billing
Decision
Support
stat’s
reports
Config.
Upload
Element
Managers
Servers & IT
Network
Transport Network
Figure 8; The components utilised within the Planning and Administration process

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3.4 Service Provisioning
3.4.1 General
Service Provisioning, or Fulfilment, is the common name for the overall process of implementing
and activating services for a customer. This process addresses the need to speed up and automate
the provisioning process, i.e. the efforts required from the time the service is ordered by a
subscriber until he can start to use it.
Traditionally it has been a back office activity that has been allowed to take a considerable amount
of time, but this is not the case any more. The objective of the industry is “one-touch provisioning”
or, as it is also called, “flow-through provisioning”. The ability to offer self-service with instant
activation of services is becoming a necessity among the Network Operators.
This was often a relatively simple task – adding a new telephone subscription involved finding a
free port in the nearest switch. But now a service could be comprised of multiple network
connections, authentication characteristics and service components like email accounts and
application subscriptions. Therefore Service Provisioning is now identified as one of the prime
areas for automation, requiring the largest share of the OSS investment budget.
Service Provisioning is the most complex discipline within the OSS area. Here are a few highlights
of what needs to be considered:
• The activation of a service may involve both automatic and manual steps. They all have to be
executed in an optimal and yet well-defined order.
• The manual activities may be performed by back office staff, contractors and / or the customer
himself.
• While investigating the possibility to deliver a service for a customer, it may become evident
that for instance the network resources are not available. Hence an expansion has to be
planned.
• The factor of time and the status of an activation order are significant. There may be an
agreement that the service is to be delivered on a specific (later) date. While awaiting that date
the order may be cancelled or modified. And the fact that the service delivery is deferred may
be due to that the required resources are not yet installed, hence when the additional switch or
router is added, a set of pending service orders should be activated.
• It involves inter-working with service components in a multitude of network elements and/or

their management systems, application servers, etc., all in a multi-vendor environment, with
proprietary interfaces and interrelated configuration information.
• Self-service, i.e. allowing the subscriber to do the provisioning by himself and expecting the
result to be immediately available is as already stated becoming a necessity. This involves
enforced mechanisms for authentication, auditing and access control of user activities.
• Transaction control – if a part of a multi-step service provisioning fails, then the others have
to be roll-backed.
• High speed and volume.
As can be concluded from the by no means complete list above, provisioning is a very complex
area. Also the implementation of it is very much related to the organisation and processes of the
Network Operator. Hence, the solutions vary significantly between different Network Operators,
and the market architecture as defined by the available products is equally fuzzy. We believe that

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this area is a candidate for significant simplification. Today there are too many components needed
to achieve a flow-through provisioning support.
We have found the following categories of products addressing the provisioning area. Note that
there is a great deal of overlap between them.
3.4.2 Order Managers

The Order Manager receives an order from a Customer Care system, a custom-tailored web
interface or any other type of interface to a help desk or self-service interface. It then performs a
series of pre-defined tasks in sequence to accomplish the order. These may involve manual tasks
spanning several weeks, as well as instant interactions with the existing OSS system.
The typical characteristics of an Order Manager cover features like:
• Flexible (often graphical) definitions of the process flow required to handle the order
• The entire flow, from customer inquiry till delivery confirmation is supported
• Workflow functionality required to support the manual steps
• Process and activity scheduling
• Worklists to support the provisioning staff
• Summary views of ongoing business – order status, delivery times, etc.
We have the found the following vendors and products that address the area:
• MetaSolv (previously Architel and Nortel) with the OMS (Order Management System)
• Lucent (previously Kenan) with their Arbor OM (Order Manager)
• Oracle and their Order Manager, part of the e-Business CRM suite
Ceon and Tertio are another type of provisioning systems. They address a wider scope with their
products, from Order Managers down to activation of network elements.
3.4.3 Workflow systems

Another category of products originates from the workflow area. These products are designed to
facilitate the implementation of a set of processes within an organisation. A process is often a
mixture of manual and automated activities. We often find these products in the provisioning
arena. The main difference from the Order Managers above is that they do not have a built-in
knowledge of the concept of orders. On the other hand they can be used to support many of the
other processes within the Network Operators environment, like Trouble Ticketing, CRM, etc.
• Clarify
• Remedy; ARS
• HP; ChangeEngine
• Staffware, ActionFlow, etc. are other workflow engines. We do not see them very often in the
telco domain.

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3.4.4 Provisioning engines

In this category we have placed the products that are dedicated to the task of service activation.
They are not supporting the manual tasks, they rather focus on parallel high volume interactions
with underlying network elements, Element Managers, Network Management Systems or
application hosts. They often comprise a library of adapters to various vendor systems. They
support transaction control, i.e. the capability to roll-back already performed operations when the
order could not be completed.
• Nortel (previously Architel) with the ASAP product (Automated Service Activation Platform)
• Oracle SFM (Service Fulfilment Manager, part of the Oracle e-Business suite
• Ericsson SOG (Service Order Gateway)
• Ehpt Service Initiator
• The TIBCO Telco Hub is an extension to the TIB/Rendezvous set of products. It originates
from the acquisition of InConcert. (See also the section on Integration Framework.)
3.4.5 Network Provisioning

When it comes to provisioning of common network related services a specific category of products
has evolved. These support the activation of services like end-to-end connections within ATM,
Frame relay and SDH/WDM networks, IP VPNs etc. For a single vendor type of network they
often compete with the vendor’s own Network Management System.
The area is complex, especially if the connectivity to be provisioned spans multiple vendors and
network technologies. The TMForum defined CaSMIM standard describes an approach to model
connectivity.
We have found the following products targeting the network provisioning area. They normally
operate in two steps – first the network topology is imported from the network itself, or from an
external inventory system. When a connectivity set-up request is received via its northbound
interface, the best route through the network is calculated and configuration commands are issued
to the underlying network equipment or their management systems.
• Syndesis’ NetProvision (this product is also licensed by Cisco as their Cisco Provisioning
Center).
• HarmonyCom and their Harmony product.
• Astracon and their Connection Manager (for layer 1 and 2 networks). The Astracon product is
also licensed by Compaq, Telcordia, Lucent and Alcatel.
• Orchestream and their Service Activator.
• Cisco VPN Solution Center.
3.4.6 Summary
Below in figure 9 an attempt is made to visualise the discussion above. The Order Manager /
Workflow system receives an order form the Customer Care / Selfcare domain. It performs the
control of the manual tasks itself and send activation orders for network connectivity to a Network
Provisioning system, and activations of “host based subscriptions” to a provisioning engine:

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Service Customer Care

order
Multi Service
Provisioning
Planning
Order &
Manager
Administration
Service Operations
Provision and Assurance Accounting
Engine
Network and Billing
Provisioning
Config.
Upload
Element
Service
Managers
Activation
Servers & IT
Network
Transport Network
Figure 9; The components needed to fulfil the Provisioning process
It should also be noted that the provisioning process interacts with the Inventory, both to verify
that the resources are available, and once the reservation is made to reflect the actual on-line
configuration of services as well.
The close integration with the Inventory has spawned a new set of provisioning solutions. The
vendors Axiom and Xenicom have combined workflow and project planning functionality with an
inventory into their respective products. Also traditional inventory vendors like Cramer and
Granite are adding workflow capabilities into their solutions.

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3.5 Service Assurance
3.5.1 General
The Service Assurance process at the Network Operator targets the need to monitor and assure a
high quality of the services delivered to the customers. The objective of the industry today is to be
able to implement Service Level Agreements (SLA), i.e. a contract where the quality of service
delivered by the Network Operator to his customer is stipulated. Offering SLAs implies the ability
to monitor, act and report the level of service.
To an increasing extent the ambition is to move from reactivity to pro-activity, i.e. to detect and
circumvent errors before they have had any impact on the service.
This area is compared to some of the other areas within OSS relatively well organised, and
industry forces have come to a form of de facto standard of what component types there are, and
what their main functionality is. The prevailing products often provide off-the-shelf integration
with each other.
3.5.2 Alarm handling

In a Network Operations Center (NOC), responsible for the supervision of a large network
comprised of heterogeneous equipment and systems, the focal point for alarm handling is very
important.
Alarms are to be collected from various sources, transformed into a unified format, logged and
presented to different operators depending on their defined responsibilities. The operators all have
preferences in views and shortcut operations. The alarm console is often the tool to make a fast
connection to an Element Manager to perform any required testing, diagnostic or bypass operation.
It is important that the amount of alarms can be reduced by elimination of duplicates, applying
correlation rules (to find primary and secondary alarms) and automatic handling of alarm on/off
situations. It is also important that the service and customer impact of a serious alarm is presented,
to govern the further handling of the error. This capability to map an equipment alarm to the
affected service and customer is crucial and one of the major problems within the industry, since
the inventory required is not commonly available in a standardised way.
Maps with status coloured icons at various levels of detail are important to give status overviews
to the staff. By operator action, or automatically, some alarms could be used to trigger the creation
of a Trouble Ticket in the TT system.
It should be noted that, depending on the size of the Network Operator, this is an area where
distribution of the responsibility may be desirable—router backbone, access network, server & IT
infrastructure etc.
A multitude of products exists. All of these “alarm consoles” collect alarms via SNMP traps,
CMIP events or proprietary agents. Their ability to perform correlation and show the “service
impact” varies. Some of the most commonly used products are:
• The Micromuse Netcool/Omnibus product is well established among all types of Network
Operators. It is also marketed by Cisco as Cisco Info Center. It is today considered the market
leader, with well over 900 installations world-wide.
Netcool supports the “customer and service impact” feature raised above by the “Impact”
product feature. Impact supports a configurable rule-based engine capable of interrogating
external information sources (network inventory, customer database, etc.) residing in
relational databases, LDAP directories, flat files etc. for customer and SLA data related to an
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• HP OpenView / Service Assurance (formerly OEMF).
• Compaq TeMIP.
• Agilent OSI NetExpert.
• Evidian OpenMaster.
• TTI Nettrac
• RiverSoft and their product OpenRiver (recently OEM’d by HP; also recently in an agreement
with Cisco and Motorola around 3G management)
• CoManage and Entuity are two fairly new entrants.
For monitoring the IT servers a product category for “intelligent” systems management agents has
been established. These agents are capable of monitoring processes, CPU and I/O utilisation, log
files, database systems and even some of the more commonly found application packages (like
SAP). Examples of these agents are SystemEdge, BMC Patrol and Emanate. They will normally
signal errors and exceptions to configured thresholds via SNMP to the Alarm handlers listed
above.
3.5.3 Performance Management

This is a component that normally is capable to:
• Auto-detect the current configuration of the infrastructure by browsing the IP network and the
MIBs.
• Collect performance data at specified periods or intervals. MIB polling, ping, remote ping,
RMON (I and II) and ftp are techniques used to obtain (and even create) measurement data.
The data is normalised and stored into a common database. Here it also may be retrieved and
utilised for long-term planning purposes.
• Perform threshold checking and generate alarms (to the Alarm handler) when thresholds are
passed.
• Produce customised reports regularly or on demand.
This area is complex. It is easy to collect huge amount of data and to produce reports, but the
complication is more related to what to measure and to whom to report. QoS (Quality-of-Service)
and SLA are acronyms that are frequently used, but the definitions vary.
This is an area where we currently see intensive development. Several products claim that they can
actively measure response times and availability (through ping) and compare to SLA defined
thresholds per application or Internet service. Some attempt to find traffic patterns over the day,
and report when exceptions are found. Most products support the IP layer, and some provide
options for Frame Relay, ATM, servers, LAN equipment, etc.
Several products exist on the market; here are the most widely adopted in the network performance
area:
• InfoVista
• Crosskeys Resolve (recently acquired by Orchestream)
• Concord Network Health
• Trinagy (formerly DeskTalk) TREND

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• Lucent VitalSuite
• Proviso from Quallaby
• Ericsson Net-tuner
• Prospect from WatchMark (only mobile networks)
• ClearView from Clear
• Trendium
• ADC Metrica (this product as well as the Ericsson Net-tuner has a background from the
telephony and circuit switched environment, but they now also support the datacom side)
The products vary in their ability to handle large volumes of data, ease of customising the reports,
and handling of physical objects (links and ports) versus services and customers.
A common form of pre-integration between Alarm handlers and Performance Management

products is organised as follows:
a) The PM component reports SLA violations to the Alarm Handler
b) From the Alarm handler it is possible to launch the PM component to achieve a performance
report of a designated service or network component.
3.5.4 Trouble Ticketing – Workflow

The TT/workflow components are used to administrate the workflow and logistics around efforts
that normally require human intervention. To send out a field engineer to perform repair or
installation work, and letting him report back into the TT system when he has completed his task is
a common usage. Since these tasks are often initiated by customer complaints the TT component is
sometimes also used as a helpdesk tool.
This component normally has interfaces towards the Alarm manager (both directions) and
provides user interfaces towards the customer help desk, the operations staff and the service
personnel.
The Remedy ARS is the most well known and established product within the telecoms industry.
Other products are Clarify, Vantive and HP Service Manager (Prolin).
3.5.5 End-to-end monitoring; Service Robots

The area of end-to-end application performance management is of increasing interest. Because
many business-critical applications are distributed across multiple platforms, residing at different
Application Service Providers, and are interconnected across multiple networks, it is becoming
evident that the performance has to be measured end-to-end.
Some of the products targeting this subject monitor the traffic between appointed workstations and
application servers, and measure the availability and response times. They could do it by installed
agents at the application client side, by RMON type agents on a LAN segment close to the client,
or by providing an API that the application can call at defined points. Here we find products like
• CompuWare Application Expert & ecoSYSTEMS

• HP OpenView VantagePoint
• Concord
• Tivoli Application Performance Management
• CA Unicenter, Application Response Option

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Another alternative is to simulate a user. This is what the service robots do. They connect to the
Network Operators network, request web pages, initiate file transfers, send and receive e-mail, and
measure the availability, the response time and the correctness of the responses.
Products addressing this area are:
• Netcool ISM (Internet Service Monitors) is comprised of seven Internet specific service
components testing DNS, FTP, HTTP, NNTP, POP3, SMP, and RADIUS.
• Avesta Trinity
• Firehunter from Agilent
• Also several of the Performance Management products listed above nowadays include this
option, like InfoVista and Cncord.
3.5.6 Summary overview

The components supporting the Service Assurance process and their information exchange is
given in figure 10 below:
TT
Customer Care
Reports
Reports
TT/
Service Assurance
Planning and Workflow
Administration TT
Perf.
Mgmt Accounting
Alarm
Mgmt Alarms and Billing
Multi Service
Provisioning Robot
Alarms PM data
Simulated
Element users
Managers
Servers & IT
Network
Transport Network
Figure 10; The components involved in the Service Assurance process
Note that missing in the figure above is the interaction from the Alarm handler to a Network
inventory and / or a Customer database to find the customer and service impact of a fault.
3.5.7 Service Level Management

Each of the above components within Service Assurance, as well as components within the other
processes, monitors and provides information related to various aspects of SLA fulfilment. Several

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of them claim to support SLAs, but of course only in the areas where they actually perform any
actions, be it alarms, performance, response times, availability monitoring, TT or whatever. SLA
could also stipulate so much more, like delivery time, response time at the help desk, etc.
However, more and more the leading products above attempt to address the whole area, often
referred to as Service Level Management. This means that they strive to cover all the areas of
network and application performance, end-to-end service quality etc. as well as monitoring against
set-up SLA parameters and report of violations against these. Trendium is a new vendor
addressing this is space.
3.5.8 Policy-based Networking

The industry effort towards Policy-based Networking actively helps both in monitoring and
increasing the customer-experienced performance of a service in a given network. This is achieved
by keeping track of and prioritising users and service in accordance with their QoS requirements
and agreements. Hence, instead of passively monitoring if the SLA is fulfilled, the network
actively attempts to accomplish the objectives of the SLA. The policy for QoS and CoS (Class of
Service) is often configured in a central location, like an LDAP directory, and then distributed to
Policy Decision Points in switches and routers to effectuate the policy.
Many of the new Multi-Service Networks implement Policy-based Networking on the IP level for
routing, prioritisation, security and error handling.

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3.6 Billing
3.6.1 General
The present flat-fee pricing structure in the Internet business is about to be replaced by other
business logic. Also traffic volume related pricing is being disputed, since it is difficult to
understand and predict for end users.
Network Operators are working hard to win their customers’ acceptance for new pricing-structures
by offering services with an indisputable added value recognised by the market. More and more
we see a move towards Content billing, i.e. letting the user actually pay for the experienced
services and their business value, as he uses them. The mode towards Content billing also
encourages the role of a Payment Provider running a micro-payment service, separated from the
Network or Network Operator.
For the foreseeable time we anticipate that there will be a mix of all these billing options, and that
the Network Operators will differentiate by creating combinations of them.
To meet this, billing system vendors are in the process of solving the technical problems involved
in
• Collecting network data from routers, switches etc.
• Collecting data about Content usage. This often includes involving the applications residing at
the Content providers, who are located anywhere on the Internet.
• Aggregating, correlating and transforming data to parameters relevant for billing of different
types of services.
• Detecting new usage patterns which may be indications of churn or fraud.
• The ability to define and implement pre-paid services.

• Finally mapping these parameters on specific customer accounts and producing bills
In addition to this, the billing products should preferably also provide the end-customer with:
• Real-time or near real-time service selection facilities and subsequent “instant” billing
handled by and visible to the customer.
• Support for secure payment transactions for received services.
To support such on-line service ordering, payments etc. no matter how the customer choose to
access their Network Operator, we firmly believe that customer access and authentication,
authorisation and accounting capabilities (AAA) are required in the network.
All this should be carried out in a highly heterogenous environment of routers, servers, security
systems, customer databases and billing systems where interface standardisation is lacking or
multiple.
Numerous products are currently emerging in this field. They all cover different sets of the listed
functionality above. Many of the vendors have also teamed up around integrated solutions with
broad functionality coverage.
3.6.2 Architecture overview

In Billing, as in many other areas, an architecture comprised of a set of components and ISV
products has also evolved. It is still changing, the recent needs for pre-paid services and e-Business
over the Internet are signs of that. In the figure 11 below our interpretation of the current
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architecture as defined by the market is shown:
Customer Care
Invoice records
Accounting To other
Accounts
SPs
Receivable and Billing
Planning and Interconnect
Rating and
Billing
Administration Billing
SDR
Service Assurance
CP’s
around
Multi Service Mediation Micro- the
Provisioning Internet
payments
UDR
Element
Managers
Servers & IT
Network
Transport Network
Figure 11; The components supporting the Billing process
The figure above tries to summarise the various steps performed from the time a Usage Data
Record (UDR) of some sort is extracted and causes a Service Data record (SDR) to be created, till
a bill or billing record is produced. In the subsequent sections below the components involved in
this processing are briefly discussed.
3.6.3 Mediation
Billing Mediation is a software product category in itself. The mediation products collect or extract
information from the network about resource usage (UDRs). The UDR could reflect a telephone
call, a file transfer, a start of a video download, etc.
The mediation products handle the complexity involved in
• Interfacing different types of networks and devices and their respective proprietary formats.
Cisco’s NetFlow is a common format for IP devices.
• Safestoring of the collected information; this is essential because it represents direct income
for the Network Operator.
• The mediation system creates an SDR by combining (aggregating) the collected information
in order to reduce the amount of information, but also to create a record that could be rated.
Matching the start and the stop UDRs of a video download is one example.
• High volume processing; often a large network may create thousands of UDRs per second. To
prevent this data from overwhelming the network, the mediation system needs to have a

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distributed, real-time policy-based filtering and aggregation scheme that extracts only billable
records and eliminates duplicates.
• Often the mediation system should add information to the billable record. One example could
be to add the subscriber identity. This is done to keep simple and capacity demanding tasks
out of the Billing and Interconnect systems. Also pre-rating can be performed here.
• Adaptability to different high order systems for various purposes, be it fraud management, hot
billing or pre-paid services.
The market leading mediation products and vendors of today we believe to be:
• Comptel
• XACCT
• HP Smart Internet Usage
• Ehpt BMP
It should be noted that the products from Comptel, XACCT and ehpt (the Initiator product) also
support downstream mediation. This means that they not only collect usage information but also
can participate in provisioning operations, i.e. to activate systems and networks by performing
configuration commands.
3.6.4 Micro-payment
As the idea of performing business transactions over the Internet is maturing into viable solutions,
the concept of micro-payments has materialised as one of the essential cornerstones. The Internet
is especially suited to handle digital goods (or services), and this requires the ability to handle
many small business transactions.
When implementing micro-payment solutions the following aspects must be considered:
• Security is a number one issue; all transactions and the payments they cause must be protected
from fraud and be auditable. The users (clients) and the providers must be strongly
authenticated.
• The transaction cost must be low.
• Capacity and high reliability are mandatory attributes of a solution.
• Openness is essential, no client wants to be forced to do business with a single Network

Operator. The idea is that a client should be able to surf the Internet, “click to buy” wherever
he finds something, and then be presented with a single bill. From this it is evident that micro-
payment involves the content providers more than the Network Operators or network
operators.
• Sometimes the end customers want to be anonymous to the content provider and only have a
relationship with their Network Operator or Payment Provider.
A summary overview of the concepts of micro-payments is provided at the web site

http://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/. Various attempts to define a standard for micro-
payments exist. Currently the company ehpt has taken a strong position in this area with their
proposed standard Jalda.
We have found the following vendors and products addressing the area of micro-payments:
• Ehpt and their product Safetrader.

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• IBM and “IBM Micro-payment”.
These products normally feed their “usage data” being a purchase into a billing product as
described below.
3.6.5 Rating and Billing

There is a vast number (several hundreds) of billing products available on the market. We believe
this is the area that has attracted the most ISVs. The functionality they attempt to cover varies
enormously between different products. Here is an overview of the coverage:
• Customer Management; the ability to define a new customer and the services he is subscribing
to is of an integrated part of many Billing systems. However, many large operators need to
manage their subscribers in a separate system, so the ability to integrate with an external
system is important.
• Same thing for Product Management – to define the product portfolio is often an integrated
part of a billing system, but, some Network Operators prefer the ability to manage the product
portfolio separately.
• Self-care; it is often essential to allow the customers to order new or modify existing services
by themselves, via the Internet.
• When providing functionality to define customers and their services, the billing products enter
the area of service activation. But this is a discipline of its own, and we describe it elsewhere.
• Rating; this is the process of determining the price for a single UDR or user event. The UDR
contains a number of attributes (like type, time of day and week, size or duration, from and to
destination, etc.) and these are used to calculate a price.
• Pre-paid services may need to be supported. This is basically the ability to bill a service and
deduct the price for it from the customer account in real time.
• Billing; this is the aggregation of all one-off, recurring and chargeable events, account by
account, and the calculation of all outstanding charges and available discounts and bonuses.
The Network Operator-defined products and package bundles may affect the pricing, as may
also volume discounts, loyalty schemes, etc. These features often relate to a billing period, i.e.
the discount rate is related to the service utilisation during that period.
• Cancellations & corrections. The ability to correct and re-issue a bill must exist.
• Accounts Receivable; this is a well-established discipline that some billing products support
while others rely on specific products addressing the area.
Here we list what we believe are the main vendors and products today for the Network Operator
market.
• Lucent (formerly Kenan Systems) and their Arbor Billing Platform

• Amdoc (formerly Solect Technology) with Internet Administration Framework (IAF)
• Portal Software’s Infranet
• Digiquant (formerly Belle Systems) with their product IMS
• Geneva
• Daleen BillPlex
• Sema Group and its product BSCS (after acquisition from LHS)

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• Ehpt Progressor
• Tapestry from AMS
• Billiant.com (a Swedish start-up)
3.6.6 Interconnect Billing

This product category supports the inter-working with other Network Operators. A bill is split
between different Network Operators according to their interconnect agreements. Historically it
mainly refers to the telephony (POTS) related services. There are a number of products in this
area:
• InterconnecT from Intec Systems Ltd. (www.intecsystems.co.uk). They also act as

Application Network Operator
• Prospero from ICL. (www.icl.com)
• Singularité (former Saville IBP) from ADC (www.adc.com)
• EHPT Settler from Ericsson-Hewlett Packard. (www.ehpt.com)
• INCA from BT (www.bt.com/inca)
• VisualWireless.com (Swedish newcomer)
Growing from the POTS Interconnect they now face the challenge of IP data settlements. To
achieve this the Network Operator and interconnect vendors will have to work closely to design
new settlement and revenue sharing models.
3.6.7 Sample configuration

To illustrate the discussion above an example of an integration of various components from the
vendors Cisco, HP and Portal Software is given in figure 12 below:
The solution relies on Cisco’s NetFlow for the collection of information about specific network
sessions including source and destination addresses and port numbers, protocol types, service
types etc. To save router load NetFlow only gathers this information from the first IP packet in a
flow.
HP’s Smart Internet Usage software then caters for the mapping of session-oriented information
from NetFlow on specific customers through the IP addresses. By correlating this with data from
other servers (www, e-mail, authentication etc.) a customer-centric Internet Data Record (IDR) is
created.
The IDR is finally fed into Portal’s Infranet billing system product:

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Figure 12; Mediation and Rating sample configuration

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3.7 Customer (Self) Care (CRM)
3.7.1 General
Traditionally the Network Operators have set-up a Customer Care or helpdesk department that is
responsible for the dialogue with the customer. By calling the telephone number of “customer
service” the customer could order a new service, report a problem or inquire about his bill.
The IT support required to provide the functionality is often available within the support systems
described above. To give a few examples of how it was done (and often still is):
• The billing system often provides the functionality to register a new customer.
• To report a problem the helpdesk accesses the Trouble Ticket system within the Service
Assurance process.
• When provisioning a service the customer service creates a work order that is sent to the
“provisioning department”, which performs the action in a series of steps by accessing a
number of systems.
Hence the Network Operator staff has access to number of different systems, depending on their
job description.
Now an entirely new paradigm is prevailing. Through the increased use of the Internet and web
interfaces, and because of the improved security mechanisms, it has become a necessity to enable
the customers to perform most of his dialogue online – i.e. the concept of self-service or self care.
The advantage for the Network Operator is that it requires less staff, and for the customer that he
normally experiences a better and faster service.
And because the Network Operator now has an additional channel for customer interaction, he
wants to use it for other purposes as well; like marketing campaigns, sales activities, inquiries, etc.
This is how the concept of CRM, Customer Relations Management, has come into the OSS area,
and especially around the subject of Customer (Self) Care.
Below the overview figure 13 visualises the discussion:

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Customer
Customer (Self) Care
CRM Portal Cust. &
Prod. db
On-line Service
On-line Bills
Activation
payments
Create and SLA
inquire TT Reports
Planning and
Administration
Service
Assurance Billing
Multi Service
Provisioning
Element
Managers
Servers & IT
Network
Transport Network
Figure 13; The Customer (Self) Care components
3.7.2 The products

There is no established set of products on the market to fill in the Customer (Self) Care process.
Our impression is that the CRM vendors and the portal platform vendors are both addressing the
area, while the existing ISVs of Billing, Trouble Ticketing, provisioning tools etc. are all
completing their products to cater for Self-service as well.
Among the CRM vendors that address the Network Operator market we have found:
• Clarify
• Siebel
• Oracle with their e-Business suite.
A number of portal platform vendors like IBM (Websphere), Ericsson, BroadVision and Oracle
(Portal-to-go) are active in the area. They specifically address the issues of security,
personalisation (to be able to offer a personalised service) and device independence (using your
mobile PDA as well as a PC browser).
For both the CRM systems and the portals it is essential to have access to customer data including
security attributes, product catalogues and the “installed base”, i.e. knowing who is subscribing to
what. LDAP directories are frequently used to provide fast access to this data.

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3.8 Integration Framework
3.8.1 General
As can be concluded from the above discussion, it is not one but a multitude of products that
together provide the functionality needed. Also, it is not one but several vendors that deliver the
products. Of course this is likely to cause poorly integrated components, which results in:
• Redundant and inconsistent information. As seen in the product survey in the previous
section, several of the products attempt to build their own view of the network topology by
browsing the MIBs provided by the network elements. This is true for the Inventory, Network
Management and Performance Management components, to mention some. The probability
that the components will obtain different and unsynchronised views is high.
• Flow-through provisioning is difficult to implement, sometimes it even becomes necessary to

manually re-enter data into several systems.
• Multiple techniques for user and security administration, since they all have their own user
registers and access control mechanisms.
• Non-integrated and different user interfaces, which leads to a complicated user dialogue when
completing the steps of a process.
The industry has understood this dilemma and taken various approaches to solving the problem.
We have observed the following main options:
1. The “total solution”.

2. Point-to-point integrations.
3. The Integration framework.
3.8.2 The “total solution”

The most radical approach is to hide the integration by creating one super-system, providing the
entire set of O&M functionality for a certain target operator. This requires a significant
development effort by integrating licensed components or developing the corresponding
functionality.
The result is one monolithic product, adapted to a target niche operator (like “DSL operator in a
box”, to give one example). The Network Operator will have to accept the functionality as is. We
believe there is a market for this type of products, especially for small start-up Network Operators.
However, some of these will quickly out-grow the solution, especially those that are successful.
3.8.3 Point-to-point integration

Most products provide an API of some sort. Pair-wise the ISVs provide modules that link between
each product’s API. As an example, Netcool, the predominant Alarm Handler, provides a gateway
that links directly into the Trouble Ticketing product Remedy ARS. This is what we call point-to-
point integration, and it is normally done around the market leading products. It is simple and
easily deployable. On the negative side is that it is product specific, and it does not facilitate a later
replacement of a component. And it is only available for the most common and obvious types of
integration.
On the GUI side most products can be rather easily integrated to a certain extent. This has been
facilitated by the move to a web user interface.

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But this is not enough. When it comes to integration of a set of OSS products, where almost every
component has to interact in several ways with most of the others, the number of point-to-point
integration modules will become too many. And when including the often significant number of
legacy applications in operation at a Network Operator the situation gets even worse. In the figure
14 below a common type of OSS system map is visualised:
Customer QoS
Problem Handling
Order Handling Management
Subsidiary 1
Sales Service Problem Business Unit B

Management e Invoicing and
Service Collections
Service Planning Configuration
and Development
Service Quality Rating and
Management Discounting
Network Planning Corporate IT
and Development Network Maintenance
Network and Restoration Network Data
Management
Provisioning
Network Inventory
Element Management
Manager A
Business Unit A Element

Element Manager C
Manager B Partner X
Figure 14; A typical set of point-to-point integrations
3.8.4 Integration Framework

Due to the “mess” introduced by the large number of point-to-point integrations the concept of a
message bus supporting the exchange of messages between components attaching to the bus has
been introduced. This significantly reduces the number of integrations, since the component only
integrates with the bus itself (figure 15 below):
Customer QoS Invoicing and

Sales Order Handling Problem Handling
Management Collections
Service Planning Service Problem Service Quality Rating and Service

and Development Management Management Discounting Configuration
NewTech2000
Message Bus
Network Planning Network Network Maintenance Network Data Network Inventory

and Development Provisioning and Restoration Management Management
Element Element Element

Manager A Manager B Manager C
Figure 15; The message bus concept

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The main functionality of the message bus is:
• To support a distributed environment. A component could be located anywhere.
• Guaranteed message delivery. If a certain component is temporarily down, the bus will deliver
the message when it comes back up again.
• Several paradigms of interworking, which may facilitate the system design. The two most
obvious are request – reply (traditional client - server), and publish – subscribe type of
operations.
• Furthermore additional functionality for security, transactions support, etc. may be included.
The message bus functionality is supported by a category of products referred to as middleware. It

is not a new technology, but it is not until recent years that it has come into use. It is nowadays
also called EAI (Enterprise Application integration). Among the leading EAI products that are
visible within the OSS area we have found:
• TIBCO; TIB/Rendezvous
• Vitria
• Kabira; ObjectSwitch
• Corus
• IBM; MQ Everyplace
• SeeBeyond
• WebMethods
• The Corba ORB vendors
• IGS; eJai
In order to use attach a component to an EAI bus there is often a need to implement an adapter, or
Adaptation Unit, that performs the translation between the product’s native API and the interface
provided by the bus.
But the message bus is mainly a safe transport mechanism. It is equally important to agree on the
contents and structure of the messages that are to be exchanged. This can be accomplished to some
extent by using “self-describing” data. The basic idea is that in each message a tag describing
what type of data it is precedes every data field. This facilitates maintenance of the system – when
a message layout is changed, only those components actually using the new or modified field of
data need to be updated. All the others are not affected, since they only extract the type of data
they are interested in from the message. The dominant method for self-describing data is now
becoming XML.
However, the prevailing method is to go further and agree on a common information model, at
least for the information objects that need to be exchanged. The so called “Common Business
Object Model” is achieved by converting a native message to the common information model
when a message is sent to or published on the bus, and vice versa when it exits.
The conversion of a message can be performed in the Adaptation Unit, or by a conversion function
provided by the middleware. Some of the products above incorporate message translation features
– the Tibco Message Broker and IGS eJai to mention a few.
The integration enabled components, the Adaptation Units, the interfaces and the EAI middleware
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could be based. In the figure 16 below we have also introduced a bridge which may convert
between different middleware technologies:
IEC Functions
Functions
IEC Functions
Functions
BE BE
CBOM
Data
Data IT
IT Component
Component Data
Data IT
IT Component
Component
BO
AU
AU AU
AU
BOI BOI
Technology 1
Bridge Message Bus
Technology 2
Legend
AU, Adaptation Unit

IEC, Integration Enabled Component
CBOM, Common Business Object Model
BOI, Business Object Interface
BE, Business Event
Figure 16; The components of a multi-technology bus
One additional issue around the Integration Framework is who should be responsible for a certain
scenario or flow of messages between the components. Should it be a single event in one
component that triggers the others? A more sophisticated approach is to introduce a workflow
engine that controls the entire scenario and ensures that all the actions are performed consistently.
Examples of such workflow engines are HP ChangeEngine and Tibco InConcert.
And this leads us up to the current state: The message bus, the common information model and the
workflow engine are actually the cornerstones upon which the TMForum recently announced
initiative around NGOSS (New Generation OSS) is based!
3.8.5 Current experiences

During recent years the pioneers of the industry has followed the road of integration of “best-of-
breed” components based on middleware technology. Especially it has been demonstrated in the
TMForum catalyst projects. The experiences so far we conclude to be:
1. It works.
2. It is more complex and costly than envisioned. The effort to agree on and implement a
common information model within a significant number of adaptation units and to verify and
maintain the solution is considerable. This leads to high costs and long lead times.
3. Security is still an outstanding issue. We have not yet observed a credible effort to implement
a centralised and uniform approach to handle user administration and access control over a
disparate set of components.
These experiences are now opening an opportunity for the Systems Integrators. By pre-integrating
and pre-configuring a set of components the cost and time-to-deployment can be decreased.

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4 Market analysis
In this section we give a number of observations on how we believe the OSS market is moving,
both from a technological point of view, and how the market actors are navigating.
4.1 Technology & standards

The old battle between SNMP and TMN/CMIP is dead. No one (to our knowledge) uses
TMN/CMIP as the manager – agent protocol paradigm anymore. It is too complicated and
expensive.
SNMP is widely adopted, but mainly for relatively simple tasks, like Fault Management and read-
only type operations, e.g. to obtain the current configuration and to retrieve performance data.
CORBA nearly made it as a more sophisticated approach to application inter-working for purposes
like provisioning etc. But it is complex to use and the interoperability between different
implementations has not been smooth all the time. Now it seems like EAI (Enterprise Application
Integration) products with proprietary implementations are taking over. They are easier to use,
they already from the beginning supported the “publish – subscribe” paradigm, and they were
better marketed. The result is that interface standards are now more relevant to describe in the API
(Application Programming Interface) form than in protocol syntax. In this way it will allow for an
adaptation to any form of EAI product. Some products provide a CORBA API.
The Network Management Platform based on TMN/CMIP and the GDMO approach to object
modelling is dead. The approach of the 80’s to provide an open platform specifically for network
management never came true. And that is good, network management is not that different from
any other type of application. These “dinosaur-like” platforms are nowadays used mainly for fault
management, to display alarms and to provide topology maps.
A few years ago we believed that enterprise management, with the WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise
Management) standard and the management framework players like Computer Associate’s
Unicenter and IBM’s Tivoli would enter the telecom world. That does not seem to happen, the
main reason being that they did not succeed even on their own battlefield, the enterprise. The
enterprise management frameworks were found to be too expensive, they took too long time to
implement and the return-on-investment was never proved.
When DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) took over the DEN (Directory Enabled
Networks) and CIM (Common Information Model) from Microsoft and Cisco we expected these
efforts to have a major impact on the industry. The idea of having a Common Information Model
to describe the subscribers, services and the infrastructure in an easily accessible LDAP directory
was and still is compelling. But information modelling is difficult, and so far they seem to struggle
with “the next version” of that model.
The TMForum effort around NGOSS (New Generation OSS) is receiving significant attention
within the OSS community. Everyone is at least by word praising the initiative. The major
consequence so far is that the idea of having an EAI based message bus for application integration
now is widely accepted. The next steps, to agree on the “Shared Information Model” and to
implement a process engine will be more difficult. The TMForum defined concept of a “Contract”
to describe what is exchanged over the bus is fine, but they seem to have made it very complicated
already from the beginning.

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4.2 ISVs
The struggle between the product vendors (ISVs, Independent Software Vendors) is of course
ongoing. Depending on their product’s life cycle they are in a rising or falling trend when
considering market share and revenue.
If they are successful, they manage to attract more venture capital and the revenue from product
sales is higher, and vices versa. Hence, the winners “get it all”.
The winners will expand their business by buying products that compete with or complement their
own product. In this way they can expand their market share, and also take a larger chunk of the
business. Some ISVs have managed to put together a whole suite of products, be they internally
developed or acquired. They also provide Integration Services. These companies we hereafter call
OSS vendors.
In order to minimise the risk of conflict or competition there is also a tendency that every vendor
attempts to establish an alliance with every other vendor, which whom he is not directly
competing. The value of these alliances is not overwhelming.
4.3 Systems Integrators

The term “Systems Integrator” (SI) normally refers to the company providing the professional
services required to install, configure, integrate and put an OSS solution into operation. It could be
a consultant company or an Equipment Supplier. Normally the products are included in the
solution price as well, but this does not always have to be the case.
We believe that the term “Component Integrator” (CI) is maybe more accurate, because most
Systems Integrators only sell and integrate one component at a time.
We have come across the approach where a Systems Integrator is responsible for the Integration
Framework and co-ordinates the work of a number of Component Integrators, each delivering and
integrating his component. The Systems Integrator is then responsible for the integration and
system test activities, while each CI can concentrate on what he is good at – his own product. The
Network Operator can buy OSS components from ISVs and their CI representatives, and the
Systems Integration and the Integration Framework from another company. We believe this is a
trend that will increase.
Earlier in this document we referred to the experiences of performing large-scale integration

projects of best-of-breed products. They are long and costly, and this is now opening an
opportunity for the Systems Integrators. By pre-integrating and pre-configuring a set of products
the cost and time-to-deployment can be lessened. Leading Systems Integrators are introducing
their Configured-To-Fit suites or bundles of pre-integrated products.
We find one exclusive set of Systems Integrators, the “big 5” who are supposedly active around
the world, and local or regional Systems Integrators. The big 5 are CAP Ernest Young, KPMG,
Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Accenture and Deloitte & Touche. Our experience is that these Systems
Integrators are NOT present everywhere.
4.4 Equipment Suppliers

The Equipment Suppliers have a difficult situation. On one hand they should stay away from the
OSS market, because they are considered to be “box movers” by the Network Operators and
should stick to that. They do not have the credibility to deliver open multi-vendor solutions.

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On the other hand some Network Operators need a total turnkey solution from an Equipment
Supplier, and the OSS part of it has to be included “for free”. The Supplier also recognises that he
should “move up the value chain”, and that an OSS solution might give a competitive advantage.
The result is that most Equipment Suppliers have a strategy for providing complete, multi-vendor
OSS solutions from a separate Professional Services organisation. But no one seems to be very
successful in doing it.
The only exception among the large players is Cisco, who is not providing any professional
services around OSS. Instead they have introduced the concept of an Eco system of partners, both
ISVs and Systems Integrators.

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5 Recommendations
This white paper is targeted towards Network Operators. In this concluding sections we make an
attempt to sum it all up, by giving a set of conclusions and recommendations. And because most
Network Operators are unique, our recommendations will be rather open and allow for adaptation
to the specific case:
5.1 Select your OSS strategy

This is of course easier said than done. To implement a full-scale OSS solution capable of
supporting all of the major processes described previously we estimate cost in the range of 50 –
200 million SEK. And to do it right is a prime concern for everyone - from top level management
to operations staff. Around 60-70% of a Network Operator’s expenses are spent on operations, and
the OSS is the primary tool to make the operations run faster, better and cheaper.
Furthermore, the Network Operator must be prepared for mergers & acquisitions. Since it is the
reality within the telecom industry - to eat or be eaten, it happens frequently that the organisation
and the support systems will have to be modified. This has the consequence that there is almost
always an unstructured legacy in place – the result of the latest merger. Secondly it becomes
evermore evident that the Network Operator with the cleanest and best-integrated OSS
environment in place has a clear advantage. To summarise – the need for an IT strategy for the
OSS area is becoming critical.
Here are the major alternatives:
5.1.1 Own development

We believe that this document demonstrates that there are many products available on the market
which address the needs of Operations and Maintenance of the Network Operator. It does not
make sense to develop in-house what can be bought on the open market. Even if the cost is
roughly the same for the complete implementation of a first phase, relying on products and
benefiting from investments partially paid by others is profitable in the end. It is not the OSS
components that make the Network Operator unique or provide a competitive advantage; it is
rather how they are integrated and used that make the difference. So – try to avoid own
development.
5.1.2 The “total solution”

Most of the Equipment Suppliers and some of the large ISVs / OSS vendors claim to offer
complete OSS solutions. They are often adapted for a specific type of Operator and target the need
to achieve an “out-of-the box” solution.
For a Network Operator that is very focused and has no intention of expanding his business into
new areas, this may provide a feasible alternative. He gains a shorter deployment time and avoids
many of the hassles involved in systems integration.
However, we do believe that this approach has a number of disadvantages:
• Single-vendor dependence; the Network Operator has to rely on a single OSS vendor. And no
vendor can be good at everything.
• Flexibility; what happens when the need for new functionality to support new services or
business patterns arises?
• Multi-vendor support; possibly the freedom to select network equipment from any supplier
will be restricted.

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5.1.3 Best-of-breed products

To be able to select the best product in each class and to implement it separately is tempting. It
allows for freedom of choice and tough competition in every purchase. Since most products are
capable of being adapted to a specific environment it is a viable approach.
However, experience has shown us that there are some drawbacks in the best-of-breed approach:
• It is actually quite time-consuming and expensive to do the integration from the beginning
every time. And the effort to maintain it is also significant.
• If each product is implemented by a separate project, and possibly also a separate Systems
Integrator, we tend to arrive to an architecture where the complete OSS solution is a
patchwork comprised of point-to-point integrations. Each SI project of course wants to get
away with a minimal effort.
• What if a need is best solved by combining functionality residing in two products? The clear
product focus may sometimes make it difficult to reuse and combine functionality.
• The actual intellectual effort to decide what information resides where, and how it flows from
there to other consumers of the same information, tends to be done ad hoc. And the overall
decisions of what product should do what also may become neglected – keep in mind that
there is often significant functional overlap between the products.
This approach we believe is best fit for an Operator who has a competent systems integration
organisation of his own.
5.1.4 Integration Framework & Solutions

Here we try to define an OSS strategy somewhere in between the two previously described. In lack
of a better name, call it NGOSS (New Generation OSS), or Integration Framework & Solutions as
above. It is comprised of:
1. An Integration Framework
Please refer to the previous section on Integration Framework. Here we describe the motives
behind selecting a middleware solution and defining a Common Business Object Model to achieve
an environment where your OSS component could be fit to interwork.
We believe that the Integration Framework project should be executed by your own organisation,
or a SI partner who knows your business well and with whom you have a strategic partnership.
This project is responsible for your IT strategy, your interfaces and your information model – it is
important!
There are some advantages if the Integration Framework SI is not the same as the one(s) you select
to provide your other solutions. Most importantly, you get an independent “judge” between
projects all fighting with their own budget and time plans.
2. OSS solutions
There is a major difference between buying solutions and products. A solution is the resolving of a
need, it may be comprised of one or several products plus the required integration and
customisation, and it is (normally) provided by a turnkey project also taking care of migration,
training, introduction and support.
It is hard to give a definite answer on how big the “need” motivating a solution should be. What is
a “lagom” (=just right) chunk of the OSS cake? We believe the process-oriented approach
introduced in the previous sections is a good way to start. Some Systems Integrators will have pre-
integrated suites (of best-of-breed products) for Service Provisioning, Service Assurance, etc.

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We believe this approach is best fit for medium to large scale Network Operators who needs to
maintain competitiveness and freedom of choice, with limited resources and requirements for short
Time-To-Service.
5.2 Define your partner strategy

You as a Network Operator will have to establish a set of partnerships – with Equipment
Suppliers, with ISVs / OSS vendors and with Systems Integrators. It is necessary to have a strategy
on how to select and maintain your partners. Here are a few recommendations:
1. Long-term relationships
It is better to have few, close and lasting relationships, than the opposite. The fact that your
partners know you business and your environment is of tremendous value in finding joint
opportunities. Your partners form your “eco system”, make sure that they are aware of each other
and work well together.
2. Adopt a method for Product and Independent Software Vendor selection
Product selection; this can not be based on brochures obtained via the Internet. A product must be
evaluated against a requirement specification (which should be pretty open, because no-one could
define all the requirements that products deliver solutions to), it must be installed and run in a
field-trial, and characteristics like openness, architecture, scalability, resilience etc. must be
carefully investigated. However, do not over-evaluate, the chance is pretty high that after 3 years
there will be a better product around.
Vendor selection; evaluating the vendor and his local support (which may be one of your Systems
Integrators) is equally important. Strength, commitment, maintenance, development plans, partners
and adaptiveness are equally important.
3. Find your Systems Integrator(s)

And at last, but not the least, it is of vital importance to select one or a few Systems Integrators
that are willing to deploy and maintain your OSS solution(s). Here we believe that key factors in
the evaluation are:
• Local presence; but also the capability to follow you when expanding abroad.
• A good and comprehensive knowledge of the Network Operator space as well as the OSS
area. Also the ability to understand and deploy Integration Frameworks we believe is essential
to ensure a maintainable and extensible solution.
• A powerful set of partnerships with the market leading product vendors.
• A readiness to deliver (and maintain!) pre-integrated bundles (Configure-To-Fit) suites of
these products.
4. Define your Request For Proposal (RFP) process
Depending on the OSS strategy chosen, define a strategy on how to purchase your OSS products
or solutions. We find that many Network Operators do not know whom to send the RFPs to – to
the product vendors, the Systems Integrators, the Equipment Suppliers, or maybe even to their IT
vendors. Our advice is to send it to the list of preferred Systems Integrators. Send also a copy to
the ISVs you believe may have a relevant product, and ask them to 1) invite their own preferred SI
to bid, or 2) to establish a partnership with one of the established SIs.
5.3 General hints

1. Allocate Competent Resources
It is a common misconception that if you buy a product instead of developing a system yourself,
then the problem is over. That is not true, of course.

white paper 2002
WHITE PAPER
The Gartner Group claims that putting a product to work cost 10-15 times more than the product
itself. We believe this ratio is decreasing today, but it still means a significant cost. However,
buying a product and not allocating the resources to implement it is a waste of money. Also it
should be remembered that most products and frameworks around are so complex in nature, that
creative and highly skilled staff could create more of a difference than the actual functional
dissimilarities of the products.
2. Use the competition

As indicated throughout this paper, there are several OSS products in each product category.
Hence, there are several vendors that compete fiercely. Use it - significant discounts can be
achieved in an open bid situation.
3. Standards and Organisations

Follow the standardisation work in TMF, IETF, DMTF etc. to catch trends, industry efforts
interesting vendors.
4. Follow the market

Market awareness is important; the Network Operator must follow the market, the technology and
the trends carefully in order to avoid dead ends, find the strong products and vendors and still
detect newcomers.
Here follows a list of some of the OSS sites we tend to follow. Our advice is to do the same:
http://www.osswatch.com/
http://www.current-oss.com/
http://www.globaloss.com/frame.htm
http://www.totaltele.com/
http://www.telecomclick.com/index.asp
- End -

white paper 2002
B001834
Head Office: Liljeholmsstranden 3 Box 47612 SE-117 94 Stockholm Sweden Tel +46 8 726 75 00 Fax+46 8 19 33 22
www.ausystem.com

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OSS Solutions for Network Operators –

white paper, 2002

OSS Solutions for Network Operators –

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OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 3 (52)

3.8.1 General ............................................................................................................. 41

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 4 (52)

About the author and the company

Teleca is listed on the O-list of the Stockholm Exchange.

 2002, Teleca AB, Stockholm, Sweden

All rights reserved. This document is protected by copyright.

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 5 (52)

A Network Operator we define to be a Communication Service Provider who has a network

• What is OSS all about, what functional scope does it cover?

1.1 About the document

1.2 The content

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 6 (52)

1. This is the beforehand introductory section.

1.3 About the intended reader

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 7 (52)

2.1 Market background

This transformation will come as a result of a number of communication megatrends.

• The extraordinary growth of the Internet and IP services and applications.

• The compelling case for B2B e-business.

• Intensified competition and specialization driven by deregulation and globalization.

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 8 (52)

2.2 The broadband multi-service network

Data (FR, etc..)

Figure 1; Today’s networks providing different services

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 9 (52)

Figure 2; The architecture for next generation networks

2.3 The services and applications

High Speed Internet access

Dial-up Internet access

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 10 (52)

Access to mobile services

Video and other streaming services

Application services and access

Leased lines, Frame Relay and IP-VPNs

IP-VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)are becoming an attractive alternative. IP-VPNs basically

Enterprise access & local services

2.4 The access technologies

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 11 (52)

Fiber to the office

• fiber to the office, to larger enterprise sites,

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 12 (52)

Fiber to multiple tenant buildings

State-of-the-art IT and communication facilities are increasingly seen as a competitive factor in

Wireless broadband access - LMDS

LMDS (Local Multi-Distribution Systems) are wireless high capacity point-to-multi-point

Wireless broadband access – BWLL

Bluetooth brings convenient personal connectivity to users, by providing wireless inter-connection

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 13 (52)

2.5 The backbone network

The packet backbone network

• real-time traffic for person-to-person communication

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 14 (52)

3 The realm of OSS

3.1.1 TMN architecture

Figure 3; The TMN “pyramid”

Element Management The management functionality that is required to operate a

OSS Solutions for Network Operators – 15 (52)

Service Management The network provides services. A leased line subscription, an