Source: OSS Observer
Author: Patrick Kelly
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2008
Link: http://www.ossobserver.com/stories/details.cfm?storyID=198

The IIR Optimizing OSS and Service Provisioning Conference was held in Prague, CZ from October 14 – 16, 2008.

Author: Patrick Kelly

The IIR Optimizing OSS and Service Provisioning Conference was held in Prague, CZ from October 14 – 16, 2008. Attendance was approximately 30 people with a high concentration of CSPs from both Eastern and Western Europe. The sessions provided some practical implementations in the areas of data management, service impact analysis, and federated inventory management. OSS Observer's Patrick Kelly presented and participated on a panel on the first day of the conference.

A major theme of the conference focused on process automation in the operations area and techniques for strengthening business cases needed to justify software investments. The format of the conference promoted some useful dialog among conference delegates. The size of the event and opportunities for after hour networking allowed delegates to let down their guard and discuss some of the more difficult issues facing next generation software migration.

Telecom Italia presented on the topic of determining strategies for upgrading legacy OSS infrastructure to deliver next generation services. The program known as NGN2 started in 2007, focused on fiber access management, inventory alignment, and acceptance of a SOA based architecture. Telecom Italia has accepted the TMF guidelines for eTOM process mapping and using SID as the general information model framework. The recurring problem for TI to solve is reducing the conversion process and recoding of inventory information. Often different naming conventions are used so when new technologies are deployed it results in changes to each OSS system in the inventory, fault, and order management systems. Since network equipment have different coding names, TI introduced a layer to map uniform coding used by OSS to network coding.

Telefonica Francisco Javier Zorzano Mier spoke on inventory management. He works in Telefonica I+D, Telefonica's research and development subsidiary, on the design and implementation of the SIGRES (Sistema Integrado de Gestion de Redes y Servicios) project--an initiative to gain consistency across Telefonica Latin America's network OSS technology. The SIGRES project covers Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Columbia and includes around three to four million residential customers.

Henrik Dam, CTO Danske Telecom gave a presentation on OSS for wireless broadband. Danske Telecom provides WiMAX coverage for seven cities in Denmark. Approximately 200 base stations have been deployed. The focus of the presentation concentrated on customer support as it relates to managing quality for customer churn. Danske is using DPI technology to identify bandwidth hogs.

In addition to attendance by well known suppliers such as NetCracker and Comptel, I also had the opportunity to meet a company coming out of stealth mode and a local vendor.

I spoke with Leo Zancani, CTO and founder of Ontology based in London. The company is just coming out of stealth mode. UK based and founded 2006 by executives from Orchestream and MetaSolv. OSS/CAD was launched in May 2008. Customers include BT and Internet Solutions in South Africa. OSS/CAD reinterprets business, operational and infrastructural data as a single, virtual Unified Service Model. This virtual Unified Service Model gives service providers a single, transparent knowledge-based view of the services that run across their systems. It is targeted at bringing together data from disparate systems to help with service impact analysis.

I also met with a number of people from Emeldi based in Prague. Emeldi focuses on order management, pricing management, and provisioning with their TBOSS product. Most of its customers are in Europe and include – Telefonica O2, Slovak Telecom, Telekom Austria. Emeldi has a connection to Canada and is adding staff in the Ottawa area. Key accounts in Canada are Bell Canada and Nortel.

This was a worthwhile conference in the quality of the information disclosed by CSPs. It is hard to justify for suppliers that can get more for their marketing dollars by attending the general events such as Mobile World Congress or larger telecom software specific events such as TMW.