Tom Richards calls it "sweating your assets."

Richards, Clear Communications Corp.`s president and CEO, is referring to the new imperative that service providers squeeze out every conceivable drop of value from their networks.

Of course, making the most of network and personnel resources has never been more important for service providers who are fighting for their lives in a brutal telecom economy. AT&T Corp. confirmed that very point when on Jan. 16, it agreed to pay systems integrator Accenture Ltd. $2.6 billion to effect new efficiencies in AT&T`s operations technologies and processes.

Vendors are pushing network and service management tools such as capacity optimization software, intelligent fault management solutions, inventory and data reconciliation systems and anything that allows for automation to give service providers added muscle to push down operating expenses. The promise of new operating efficiencies through OSS is not a hollow one, says consulting firm RHK Inc., which says U.S. total telecom opex spending in 2000 was $179 billion, but estimates $71 billion of that could have been eliminated through use of OSS.

Maximizing Capacity

Whether offering wireless services, leasing private lines or managing an optical core, network engineers and their employers increasingly are looking for ways to
maximize the capacity they already have in place.

On the wireless front, Schema Ltd.`s Telecom Resource Management (TRM) platform is one of the tools helping carriers including Cingular Wireless, U.S. Cellular Corp. and Verizon Wireless wring more bandwidth from existing systems.

Schema founder Yuval Davidor describes TRM`s functions in three parts: collecting large volumes of minute data about the physical and logical network from many sources, normalizing that data into a common pool and then applying special algorithms to create a multi-layered "impact matrix." From the provider`s point of view, the result is an onscreen map with real-time performance presented in a "mosaic" showing "bins" every 100 yards or so. Where the signal strength per bin is weak and calls are dropping or hand-offs are failing, TRM prescribes new channel allocation plans or other corrective actions.

The system is finding embarrassing measures of waste. Through half a dozen real-world implementations, "we`ve never increased capacity by less than 17 percent," Davidor says. "While 20 to 25 percent is typical, it has been 30 or up to 50 percent in some cases, all entirely out of existing assets. Optimization is applied on top of what you have, not instead of what you have. Spectrum is precious, and tools like this can help you make the most of it."

Providing optimization systems and professional services to all flavors of time- and code-division multiple access cellular voice and data service networks, Schema gathers more than standard `drive test` performance data. It also taps information from switch-log call detail records, QoS probes, other sources and from the entire network simultaneously.

"The drive test may report 17dB, the prediction may report 7dB, and the switch may report no problem," Davidor says. "The algorithms correlate that data to come to an impact decision."

But that`s just one of the many ways service providers are working to optimize assets. Another is by ensuring they are making the most of facilities leased from other service providers and getting what they pay for from their wholesale providers.

Vibrant Solutions offers tools to help service providers ensure their networks are "cost optimized," says Parag Sheth, vice president of marketing. For example, if a service provider has three DS3s between two cities but only 50 percent of one of those connections is being used, perhaps it needs fewer DS3s. Meanwhile, a Vibrant feature called Flex Audits helps service providers check bills from other carriers for accuracy. Flex Audits resulted in $60 million in savings for one of Vibrant`s customers and typically saves customers millions of dollars, Sheth says.

Service providers are becoming more vigilant in their efforts to prevent "revenue leakage," and fraud, notes Robert Hales, vice president of marketing for North America at Openet Telecom Ltd., a mediation system provider.

Service providers, notorious for keeping poor records of their network assets, also can improve time-to-market intervals and lower human resources costs by using automated inventory and provisioning procedures.

Cramer Systems Europe Ltd., whose Dimension "inventory-centric" workflow system was deployed by British Telecom plc, FLAG Telecom and other Tier 1 and Tier 2 wireless and wireline telephony and data carriers worldwide, is one such vendor pushing automation. Dimension`s "active inventory" enables a living representation of all network assets needed to deliver service. It then compares service orders with available capacity and defines and automates the flow of tasks needed to fulfill an order.

"Its inventory plus business rules to correlate service requirements to the actual assets and then pass a sequence of real-world tasks onto provisioning and network management systems," says Cramer Systems president Kimber Lewis.

"We provide an accurate and maintainable capacity model to maximize operational efficiency through process automation," Lewis says. "We`ve begun to see requests for product that covers data center and network inventory and provisioning, and when the industry gets to that point, you`ll be talking about true telecom ERP [enterprise resource planning]."

Normally service providers have a team of technicians at their network operations centers writing script files to activate and control new services and elements, notes Richard Moore, executive vice president of Orchestream. The company`s new Service Activator software, which became commercially available this quarter, automates processes related to IP and Ethernet. "It understands network topology. It understands what network elements are capable of. And it draws up appropriate provisioning," he says.

Meanwhile, Concord Communications Inc.`s fault and performance management eHealth Suite helps service providers reduce their opex in three automated ways, explains Mike Marks, director of service provider product marketing. For one, the software can monitor servers and trigger automated fixes. For example, if a server process runs out of control and is using too much CPU so the server needs to be reset, eHealth will recognize the problem and reset the server, all without human intervention. Concord`s eHealth can also detect when applications on a server are slowing down. "If [the service provider is] using an e-mail system or an Oracle database and it slows down, that is time people are not taking orders or otherwise working. So we can generate alerts when this happens and launch corrective action," Marks says. The last example is on the network side, he says. Every service provider and enterprise has to hire IT professionals to monitor the performance of routers. "We do baselining, capacity trending and performance monitoring in an automated way -- saving 15 to 30 percent of the time a staff member spends per day doing that kind of thing."

Gus Estrella, vice president of NMS, technology and process at service provider AimNet Solutions, says his company more than quadrupled volume in activating service orders the year it adopted a product from InfoVista S.A., which considers Concord its key competitor.

Even for relatively small providers, defining and maintaining uniform work flow and best practices has become mandatory.

While physical asset inventory systems enable a provider to know the number and whereabouts of optical multiplexers, routers, switches, servers and other already active gear-historically for accounting purposes, providers looking to launch value-added services are focusing on logical inventory -- the mapping of a service across all those devices, as well as the capacity of links, says Caroline Dehnert, director of information strategy for EPIK Communications Inc., a carriers` carrier offering optical lightwave, IP and hosting services over backbone and metro networks in the Southeast United States.

Starting in August 2000, with an OSS that was little more than Microsoft Excel spread sheets, EPIK defined an overall OSS architecture with help from OSS design and integration firm BusinessEdge Solutions Inc. By the following March, EPIK had selected the Xpercom Service Resource Management system from Granite Systems Inc., designed "to know about links and capacity and how you provision that in the physical system," Dehnert says.

By July 2001, again with help from BusinessEdge, EPIK had put Xpercom into operation. "Now, if a customer orders capacity from point A to point B, our capacity planner team designs a circuit layout record or design layout record using Granite," Dehnert says. Those records then become the source of automated turn-on of switch ports and other devices, or installation orders where a link is missing in the service flow.

The recurring question since the project began was "when can we retire paper processes and move to real OSS?" she says. In capacity planning, "we still have the same number of people, but the time savings are substantial. There was a lot of data corruption before, with planners operating separate databases that didn`t talk to each other."


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Credit: Virgo Publishing Inc.