OSS are, of course, the stuff of telcos that have traditionally run them on circuit-switched networks, but many are now moving to all-IP networks, of which the poster child is BT Group Plc’s 21st Century Network.
As such, they will need the ability to prioritize real-time applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and IPTV over other, less latency-sensitive ones and this is one of the new capabilities the London, UK-based ISV is adding with Cramer6 OSS Suite.
With Class of Service Manager, we’re enabling the platform to do differentiated CoS for IP networks, i.e. the ability to do queuing and prioritizing for apps such as VoIP and IPTV, said Keith Day, Cramer’s director of product marketing.
Other additions to the Suite that extend its core inventory management offering are IT Manager, which takes Cramer6 into support for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and service delivery platform technology; Partition Manager, which enables carriers to run different operations such as fixed, mobile, wholesale, outsourcing and deregulated services in separate parts of the platform with hard-coded Chinese walls between them and Cable Manager, which extends the inventory capability into the actual cabling, fibers and ducts in a telco’s network.
Beyond that, said Day, there are three other additions that enable us to offer an end-to-end service fulfilment platform from taking an order to activation.
These are something called Thin Activation, which is the ability to activate without having to go to a separate inventory for the purpose; Service Catalog, which complements telcos’ existing catalogs to simplify the view for the billing system, and Discovery Engine, a piece of software which goes out onto the network on a regular basis to update a carrier’s model so as to enable the Thin Activation capability.
The overarching gospel preached by Cramer is, of course, that of making the inventory management system the core to a single OSS platform handling every aspect of a carrier’s network, rather than the multiplicity of discrete systems that is typical today, reflecting the piecemeal way in which services and networks have evolved. With Cramer6, the ISV believes it has achieved that goal and claims it as a differentiator vis-à-vis competitors such as Telcordia, Metasolv or NetCracker, who it argues are still in the fragmentation phase of OSS.
