Page 391 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-182 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

As an extension of the traditional Amdocs OSS/BSS portfolio, the company now also offers a range of
solutions for digital/mobile commerce and advertising, including storefronts, portals, content delivery
solutions, and related management applications.

3.7.4.3 Hewlett-Packard
HP, founded in 1939, is a name known well beyond the telecommunications market. Although active in
telecommunications since its beginning, the company has changed fundamentally several times, mark-
ing distinct periods in its telecom presence.
HP first became known in telecommunications as a vendor of advanced testing and measurement
products, some of them dedicated to the telecommunications field (e.g., transport network measure-
ment equipment). Around 1970, the company gradually shifted its focus toward computers and periph-
erals, with measurement gradually losing weight over the ensuing years. This process culminated in
1999, when the test and measurement divisions separated from the company and started up as a new
business entity, Agilent.
At approximately the same time, HP deliberately extended its portfolio in the software area with its
HP-UX operating system and Openview network and systems management product suite. Although
originally developed for enterprise networks, the product family soon included several high-end mod-
ules specifically dedicated to provider environments.
The most well-known Openview component is Network Node Manager, a network visualization tool
and relatively simple fault/alarm center. With respect to telecom operators, it is recommended that they
use an extended version of this product, Openview Operations. Operations, in addition to discovery
and ping-based availability testing, also employs agents deployed on managed nodes (servers and net-
work devices), thereby delivering much more detailed information and enabling an in-depth analysis of
device status. This information is combined with traps, log messages, and other notifications generated
by the devices themselves, thus making a comprehensive umbrella management system feasible. The key
concept here is correlation of events through a rule-based system, which makes it possible to identify the
root cause of the symptoms reported by various parts of the network. Without such a correlation-based
aggregation, operations would face a swarm of alarms that would hinder them in identifying the basic
problems they should handle.
On the basis of the success of these two flagship Openview products, HP has been extending its port-
folio in the past decade through acquisitions. Many of these acquisitions have been applicable or directly
dedicated to the telecommunications area.
OpenView TeMIP was originally the prestigious Telecommunications Management Information
Platform product of the Digital Equipment Corporation, acquired by HP through its acquisition of
Compaq. Basically an object-oriented framework for building different types of OSS applications, it
is most typically used as a platform for fault management. The most valuable component of TeMIP is
its wide base of robust integration modules for different technologies (SNMP, XML, message buses),
including technologies typically not supported by later products (e.g., TL1, CMIP, Corba).
Although both TeMIP and Openview Operations focus on fault management, interestingly HP is not
merging the two products into a single offering. Rather, TeMIP is seemingly being offered for the larg-
est telcos, where it is a core operation that is carefully maintained and constantly improved to accom-
modate new technologies, while Operations, along with the other new products, are offered for smaller
customers, the “masses” that require products they themselves can operate and configure without a
great deal of vendor support.
HP has recently increased the momentum in its acquisition activities, with new products appearing
practically every quarter. In the service management/support/help-desk area, HP OpenView again has
two competing products: HP OpenView Service Desk and HP OpenView Service Center, a product
acquired with the Peregrine acquisition in 2005. Although it is a successful and popular product, Service
Desk is expected to be discontinued to promote the more higher-end Service Center. Both of these prod-