Page 387 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-178 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

3.7.3.1 Device-Dependent Applications
Equipment vendors develop and deploy management applications in order to promote sales of their
equipment. It is no longer possible to sell networking gear without element management systems—
in other words, without management applications. These applications are offered and sold at reason-
able prices. Equipment vendors do not accrue much revenue with these element management systems
because they must support multiple frameworks. Web-based management will bring relief by offering
a unified interface to management applications. This interface is expected to be supported by all frame-
work vendors.
3.7.3.2 Device-Independent Applications
Device-independent applications are designed, developed, and deployed to work in different environ-
ments. Typically, they address the following management areas:
• Trouble ticketing to better support fault management
• Performance analysis and reporting to support service assurance
• Security management to provide a protection umbrella
• Modeling to improve resource planning and utilization
• Dashboards and balanced scorecards to help managers judge performance
• KVM to improve local and remote operations
• Location services using mashups on geographical maps
• Processing and rating CDRs (Call Detail Records)
• Infrastructure access points for collecting data to support lawful intercepts

Also, these management applications can be integrated into frameworks using Web-based technol-
ogy. The big benefit is that management applications can be loosely coupled with the framework and
with each other.

3.7.4 Vendor Profiles

A few traditional big players are portrayed in greater detail. Later, the market research section tries to
give a more complete picture.

3.7.4.1 Telcordia
Telcordia (original name: Bellcore) was established in 1984 as the joint R&D facility of the seven then-
new Bell companies. It is a good example of an OSS vendor company that initially focused on serving
U.S. wireline operators and then gradually switched its portfolio from legacy technologies to new data-
and IP-centric services, including wireless. The Telcordia product portfolio is built around the four
primary OSS functions: planning/engineering, fulfillment, service delivery, and service management.
Planning and engineering is supported by the Network Engineer suite. It is basically a GIS-backed
inventory of the physical network (i.e., inside and outside cable assets and related hardware com-
ponents). The applications offered as part of this suite provide access to data from several different
perspectives:

• Design Assistant: Helps network designers create plans that comply with the company’s build-out
policies. Also, this tool provides functions that improve design efficiency and offers automatic
checks and calculations.
• Field Assistant: Improves the efficiency of field workers by providing access to network drawings
overlaid by GIS data. In addition, technicians are able to enter updates and changes to the network
database, thus improving its accuracy.
• Schematic Assistant: Used to visualize network objects from different perspectives.