3/2/98 CommunicationsWeek T23 (SEE BOLD)
1998 WL 2380634
InternetWeek
Copyright 1998 CMP Publications Inc.
Monday, March 2, 1998
704
Telepath
Information Services
New technologies may help carriers
--
Customers want net management help
Tim Wilson
Nearly a decade ago, a few carriers began talking about a new idea.
Wouldn't it be nice, they postulated, if customers could electronically
link to carriers' operational support systems (OSSs) and directly order
circuits, monitor performance, gather billing data and purchase new
services?
The idea was dubbed "customer network management," or CNM. And it
still hasn't happened.
"We've been trying to do this for 10 years and we haven't moved one
inch," said Jim Hutchinson, network manager at Boston Children's
Hospital.
But there are signs that the glacial pace of CNM development is about
to meet the blowtorches ignited by Internet technology, customer demand
for service level agreements and heated competition. And service
providers that don't break the ice could be left out in the cold.
"We have seen huge growth in demand for customer network management
technology," said Pam Dodge, director of marketing for network
management at switch maker Ascend Communications Inc., Alameda, Calif.
"The newer service providers are really looking at the self-service
provisioning idea. The [Bell companies] are still concerned about
providing access [to their OSSs]. But if they wait too long, they could
lose a step."
Telecommunications service providers last year took in about $4.6
billion worldwide from selling network management services, which
include CNM, according to Dataquest Inc., San Jose, Calif. The market
research company estimates that figure will grow to $5.8 billion by 2001
(see chart).
But customers said that CNM is more important as a competitive weapon
than as a way to generate revenue. "For a company like ours, where we
spend a lot of time on circuit provisioning for long-haul bandwidth and
local dial tone in our [points of presence], the ability to do
provisioning over the Web would be a godsend," said Allen Thomas,
manager of enterprise management services at Mindspring, an
Atlanta-based Internet service provider that leases about 2,200 lines.
"If we could find a carrier that could do these things online, it
would definitely be a differentiator," Mr. Hutchinson said.
CNM, which some companies have renamed "customer service management,"
is a blanket term that describes services that let customers view,
manage and manipulate the carrier network using tools on their own
premises. The idea is to speed deployment of new services and reduce
customer service staff requirements by letting customers handle their
own provisioning, circuit management, ordering and billing review.
Early CNM services required the carrier to build and maintain a
version of its own management system on the customer's premises. It was
an expensive and resource-intensive task, yet customers were not willing
to pay a premium for the capability. In many cases, service providers
found that their own OSS and administrative systems were so jumbled and
disconnected that they could not provide a cohesive management picture
for their own operators, much less for their customers.
Many of those problems still exist today. But technology has improved
to such a degree that service pro-viders are beginning to think about
trying again.
Web technology is the biggest wave in this sea of change. Using the
nearly universal Web interface, service providers can give customers
easy and consistent access to management information without asking them
to install specialized tools.
"All of the information in our [Advanced Trouble Analysis Center] is
fed out to a Web page, where planning and operations people can see it
and use it to do diagnostics and capacity planning," said Jim
Parkhurst, senior staff engineer at MCI Communications Corp.'s Advanced
Network Solutions unit. MCI's new electronic invoicing service,
introduced last month, also provides billing information to customers
over the Web.
It's only a matter of time before Web-based interfaces become
commonplace as a means of linking with premises-based network management
systems, said Bob Copithorne, president and CEO of Clear Communications
Corp., which offers Web-based OSS technology.
"The customer will be able to order bandwidth, get billed or check
trouble tickets without ever talking to anybody," Mr. Copithorne said.
"It'll be just like American Airlines' reservation system, Citibank's
electronic banking or Federal Express' package-tracking system."
CLECing away
Some of the new competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) already
are working on such a system. "By the end of 1999, we will offer online
billing, service provisioning and trouble ticketing directly to our
customers via the Internet," said Steve Holland, senior vice president
and chief information officer at Allegiance Telecom Inc., a CLEC that
provides local, long-distance and Internet services in 24 U.S. cities.
But before they can provide comprehensive online management services,
service providers must find a way to get some cohesion among their
back-end systems. Most service providers still maintain separate systems
for billing, reporting, troubleshooting, monitoring, order entry and
customer service. In many cases, those disconnected systems are
multiplied by the number of services the provider offers.
"For the more established carriers, their infrastructure is just not
in good shape for offering CNM services," said Elizabeth Adams,
managing director of the Network Management Forum, a consortium that
helps service providers implement network management technology. "A lot
of their systems are really, really old."
The complexity of back-end OSS and administrative systems has been one
of the chief stumbling blocks for CNM. But a growing number of
third-party vendors, such as Clear, MetaSolv Software Inc., Objective
Systems Integrators Inc., Vertel and Visual Networks Inc., offer tools
to help consolidate and integrate carrier management information.
These tools and application development environments differ widely in
function and format, ranging from Visual's simple frame relay reporting
tool (see sidebar) to complex, customized development kits that help
service providers rebuild their OSSs on more standardized, less
programming-intensive platforms.
But such tools have one thing in common: They help telecommunications
service providers unify the information collected on the back end and
pave the way for CNM services on the front end.
Customers said service providers are in dire need of such integration.
"Even when we sit face to face with various carriers, they can't get the
provisioning right," said Mindspring's Mr. Thomas. "Until they figure
out how to do that, it makes no sense to have a Web-based service.
Whatever technology they are using now doesn't seem to work, nor do the
people who are using it."
Despite the new technology available to them, many service providers
still seem reluctant to offer OSS access to their customers. "If we open
up [our OSS] to customers, it would be at the service management level,
not a direct link," said Bernie Harris, director of standards for GTE
Corp.'s TONICS network management center. "We're not sure that the
system could be partitioned safely otherwise."
Security is a common reason why service providers say they are
reluctant to offer CNM services. Some carriers, particularly wholesale
providers, said they do not want potential competitors to have access to
their management systems. Others said they are concerned about
customers stealing data about other customers.
But current software solves many of the partitioning problems, said
Jerry McDowell, an analyst at The Robert Frances Group, a San Jose,
Calif.-based consultancy. "There is enough software to do it," he said.
"It's just that service providers are not incented to do it. The
problems are too complex. And even if CNM services become revenue
generators in the short term, eventually customers will come to expect
them as a commodity. Service providers can't make money with them."
The race is on
Software and equipment providers disagreed, however. "[Service
providers] are still working their plans out, but by late summer, I
would expect to see some services rolling out," said Ascend's Ms. Dodge.
"There's a big [development] race going on right now."
Even if new technologies provide better front-end access for
customers, though, more established telcos must still find a way to pull
their back-end systems together, observed Mr. Bill Zide, director of
the advanced intelligent networking design and engineering practice at
Bellcore.
"Cost is the chief problem," Mr. Zide said. "Gathering customer data
means being able to pull it from several different places, and that's
very difficult today. Just to see what the customer has is difficult-now
you've got to disseminate that data to your back-end systems."
Tim Wilson is an InternetWeek editor at large.
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