Copyright 1999 Intertec Publishing Corporation,
a PRIMEDIA Company
Telephony
August 2, 1999
SECTION: INTELLIGENCE & SOFTWARE; ISSN: 0040-2656
LENGTH: 663 words
HEADLINE: Application Mixmaster
BYLINE: HANNA HURLEY
BODY:
Mergers and acquisitions, new operations support system software and
e-commerce have made interoperability issues among the various systems a
popular topic within carriers' IT departments. To solve these integration
problems, New Era of Networks added a new telecommunications business unit
last May.
After honing its skill set in the financial, health care and manufacturing
industries for five years, NEON is targeting its application programming
interfaces to carriers. NEON's packaged integration adapters are designed
to help carriers shorten integration time and increase return on investment
as they integrate legacy applications, client/server environments and
Web-based applications.
NEON refers to its business mission as enterprise application integration.
"EAI terminology has been accepted in other industries, but there hasn't
been a lot of interest within the telco industry until this year," said
Dick Abramson, NEON's telco business unit president.
NEON's new business unit will bring the company's hub-and-spoke
architecture to carriers. Using NEON's EAI, applications talk to the hub,
and NEON ensures that the right information reaches the correct
applications at the right time. The suite of products provides three
functions: messaging, reformatting and rules.
"The messages trigger the applications," said Fred Thompson, vice president
of marketing in NEON's telco business unit. "In reformatting, we define the
format of the sending application and the receiving application, and the
rules engine decides which application gets which message based on content
or context of the message."
Clearnet Communications Inc., an early adopter of the EAI software, has
been using NeonImpact for the last two years as the mediation layer between
its billing and provisioning systems. Each day, NeonImpact collects roughly
3 million customer detail records from Clearnet's wireless networks.
In its PCS network, Clearnet has five Lucent Technologies switches, five
voice mailboxes, one short message box and one prepaid box. On its iDEN
network, Clearnet has three Nortel Networks switches, two voice mailboxes,
three dispatch application processors and one short message box. NeonImpact
collects the records from all the network elements and feeds it to billing
software provided by LHS.
"The billing and customer care system is large and complex," said Dave
Biensch, a manager in the information systems department at Clearnet. "With
changes to the network constantly happening, Impact allows us to react
quickly to the changes."
Within the next year, Clearnet wants to move its mediation interface to a
CORBA-based messaging application. NEON and Clearnet are working together
on the project, and Clearnet will be a beta site for the CORBA version of
the product.
Another wireless carrier headquartered in Europe, which NEON officials
de-clined to name, used NEON to decrease its provisioning process from 24
hours to 15 minutes. Previously, customer service representatives sent
faxes to back-office operations to check inventory, register the number on
the switch and authorize credit.
Using NEON, the carrier wrapped a browser-based application around the
entire process. Now, when a customer service representative sends an
application to the credit authorization, it triggers a message to the
inventory database, registers the number on the switch and enters the new
customer into the billing system. Designing and deploying the new system
took about six months.
NEON also has seen a lot of interest from voice, ISP and cable providers
offering multiple services.
"We see an emerging space in customer care and billing," said Abramson. "In
convergent billing projects, carriers look at our application as a wrapper
around the billing systems. When they are installing a new system, but they
can't shut down the old one, they put our system in front, and it makes the
migration simpler."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 10, 1999
|
