BT's Product and Systems Migration Project wins the Innovation Award at TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010

London, June 1st, 2010 - Today, Ontology Systems announces that OSS/CAD, the groundbreaking application that uses semantics to unify OSS/BSS and infrastructure, was central to BT's winning entry in this year's prestigious TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010.  BT's entry, "Semantic Toolset to Optimise Business Transformations", scooped the Innovation Award.

This year's awards attracted a record number of entries from leading communications service providers, suppliers and systems integrators. The BT entry was chosen by a panel of impartial industry experts.

The award entry itself was based on the cutting-edge work of a team from both BT and Ontology Systems. They used OSS/CAD to tackle the tough challenges in planning migrations from legacy to next generation products and services - in particular understanding the mass of data around products, systems, networks, customers, and processes which may be held in a large number of legacy systems. They started by using OSS/CAD to discover and model dependencies among products, processes, systems, networks and customers. Once they had a model, OSS/CAD showed them the knock-on effects of product migration, letting them play through "what-if" scenarios to determine the optimal order of migration steps to a strategic target.

John Wittgreffe, Corporate ICT Chief Researcher, BT Innovate and Design commented: "The TM Forum Excellence Awards are a great platform to showcase new and innovative methodologies and technologies that can impact business, and this win shows the ingenuity of the team and the importance of tools such as OSS/CAD to tackle  complex problems in a new and exciting way. Our solution revealed benefits to the planning stage including 30%-80% cost reduction, improved data cleansing and a trusted one-truth model, and importantly shorter planning times which bring forward the ultimate benefits of any migration exercise.  This comfortably surpassed all the other manual- and tool-based methods attempted."

Nektarios Georgalas, Corporate ICT Principal Researcher, BT Innovate and Design, added: "Delivering successful complex transformations quickly and cost-effectively is instrumental for growth in a recessionary market. With Ontology's OSS/CAD, our toolset maximises ROI and reduces migration risk by letting us:

• track complex element dependencies,
• analyse "what-if" scenarios,
• make decisions with full knowledge of customer impact,
• avoid conflicts and inefficiencies by harmoniously and optimally planning parallel migration activities.

As a result we can deliver multi-million transformations right-first-time, faster and with significant cost savings. It means we improve our margins and focus our newly-transformed operations on core revenue-generating activities much earlier."

Benedict Enweani, CEO, Ontology Systems concluded: "We are pleased that OSS/CAD is able to play such a key role in the BT toolset, and that the communications industry has now recognised OSS/CAD's groundbreaking capabilities. Together, BT and Ontology have demonstrated that OSS/CAD's use of semantics to federate and search legacy systems achieves, in a few weeks, what would have required many months to accomplish with traditional approaches. This presents to service providers the first practical product-based alternative to big-bang integration, and it addresses their need to better understand and manage complex OSS/BSS infrastructures."

The TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010 took place on 18th May 2010 at the Management World conference in Nice.  More information can be found at: https://www.tmforum.org/ExcellenceAwards2010/7815/home.html

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About Ontology Systems
Leading service providers are using Ontology to finally solve the problem of misaligned data across their systems.   Ontology's OSS/CAD gives them an aligned view of their BSS/OSS data to resolve billing disputes, find leaking revenue, notify customers of service faults and configuration impacts, and automate stalled system migrations.

OSS/CAD aligns data with unprecedented speed and accuracy, and at a fraction of the cost you would expect. The key to making it possible is OSS/CAD's use of semantic technology, originally developed for intelligence applications. It lets OSS/CAD build an end-to-end aligned view of OSS, BSS and network data, from the bottom up and without any disruption to existing systems.

Based in London and founded in 2006, Ontology's customers include BT,  Internet Solutions, QinetiQ, Neotel and Telenor. Ontology and OSS/CAD have received recent widespread industry recognition including inclusion in Gartner's "Cool Vendors in Telecom Operations Management Systems, 2010", Stratecast's "Global OSS/BSS Rat Pack - Stratecast's 10 To Watch in 2010" and OSS/CAD is the application at the centre of BT's  "Semantic Toolset to Optimise Business Transformations" winning entry in the TM Forum Business Innovation Award 2010.

For more information, please visit www.ontology.com

Press Contact: Nick Gregory nick.gregory@ontology.com +44 7966 841688.