FOR OPERATORS TO REMAIN COMPETITIVE and agile in an IP-enabled service environment, they must have a unified back office that can tap the information necessary to manage multiple devices, topologies, bandwidth requirements and end-user expectations, on the fly. The linchpin to the integrated OSS strategy? Inventory.

“This space is encumbered by a long, traditional idea that inventory is a list of what your network is and where it is,�says Cramer Systems CTO Don Gibson. “We reject that idea and see it as the core OSS element to control the network. The fundamental idea is that it is simpler, cheaper and better to control the network from the OSS level than it is to allow the network to control the business.�/P>

Cramer’s network control system, built around an inventory database that considers routing and capacity availability on a dynamic basis, sits between the business side of a carrier and the network, and masks much of the back-office complexity. “We are strategic to billing and CRM,�says Gibson, “while a simple interface provides visibility into strategic issues such as network origination, planning, implementation and provisioning, along with service assurance. We’re seeing a move away from department-level oversight to a strategic, holistic view of OSS with a wider sense of network management.�/P>

Part of the shift to a wider, inventory-based view stems from an increasingly complex service environment. “The demand for multiple services exacerbates the need for service providers to have a robust inventory management platform for a number of reasons,�says Darren Kelly, vice president of business development, NetCracker Technology Corp. “First, when you build automated provisioning and activation processing with inventory as a basis, you have a far greater ability to reuse these flows in the future.�For instance, a DSL activation process may be created as part of a triple play order activation. The DSL activation process can then be copied and pasted and re-used in support of other service bundles that may come along in the future, reducing carrier opex.

Secondly, in provisioning multiple services, network layers need to cooperate. “For example, an IP VPN service with hosted VoIP will require interactions with Layer 3 gear, softswitches, IP addresses, transport networks and, most likely, a few transport T1 access lines,�Kelly explains. “This is a very complex provisioning process that no single real-time activation script can handle. Without a consistent inventory across all layers of the network, which contains an accurate picture of the capacity across all the provisionable resources, a single, coherent provisioning process cannot be created. You can end up with multiple processes that can quickly become decoupled, inefficient, slow and mind-numbing to the customer.�/P>

The resulting slow time to service can be a death knell in today’s competitive environment; to stay ahead of the competition, service providers must launch new products quickly, and must be agile enough to move with the market. The real challenge is for big carriers to remain relevant. “It’s too easy to become just a pipe,�says Beau Atwater, chief architect and executive director at Telcordia Technologies Inc. “They have to dream up new services, then control the lifecycle �constantly retiring the ones that don stick and enhancing the ones that do.�/P>

Keeping up with the demands of the product marketing team requires that back-office platforms are flexible and able to act quickly �inventory management plays a central part here. “The key to IP business models is not the Internet; if telcos simply turn into Internet networks, it will be best-efforts, everyone will want on for free, and they will be over-provisioned,�says Gibson. “They need to differentiate service, provide value-adds and guarantee QoS as needed. And all of that requires management of Layer 2 of the network, to be able to differentiate Layer 3 pure IP, so carriers can make money. You have to communicate network capacities to the order systems that create services, on an ongoing basis.�/P>

Amid all this is the need for consolidation of systems for a total view of the customer. “Especially in the age of bundling, you need the same data model regardless of service or application,�says John Rathbone, senior director of Oracle Corp.’s communications industry business unit. Oracle provides a single inventory model for its e-business suite of applications. “It’s no longer a question of slicing and dicing inventory data according to the service you’re provisioning,�he adds. “To proactively upsell and service the customer, you need to see the inventory by customer, not just by how many nodes you have active for a certain voice application.�/P>

The proliferation of IP services also has given rise to more complex partnering models that impact OSS. “One of the biggest things is a move toward multiparty services where transport, access and content may come from two different companies,�says Atwater. “To provision service, telcos not only have to know their own inventory, but that of their partners.�/P>

Requirements for partnerships and rapid provisioning also mean an inventory database cannot be static. Rather than copying inventory data into a central database, Telcordia provides for a virtual database that integrates with and queries other OSS components to gather the data necessary to create an inventory profile on a situational basis. “Take IPTV,�says Atwater. “If I have 200 channels, each with [its] own requirements for service quality levels and encryption, and even ID management, I will have to have a virtual inventory system that I can query, so I can understand at any moment what I can produce, given my partner’s abilities.�/P>

While inventory-based, whole-enterprise platforms for OSS are being adopted by some carriers, the reality is that legacy systems tend to keep important data siloed in many cases. Into this breach comes the inventory API for the open-standards OSS through Java Initiative, released in May. OSS/J champions a standardized order and inventory management approach to facilitate OSS integration, get carriers modernized and allow vendors to differentiate on applications and service rather than product.

“Access to inventory components plays a substantial part in effecting an integrated OSS,�says Michel Pedneault, senior product architect at MetaSolv Software Inc. and editor of the inventory API. “Activation, assurance, planning and billing are all involved.�To lessen the risk and cost of integration, the OSS/J has crafted an API that works with legacy and new systems to ease import and export of processes for data, toward the goal of creating a federated data model that draws from multiple inventory systems