re: autoprovisioning, autonomous service creation, customer-centric network management
Hi Frank,
I'm actually spending an awful lot of time on this these days, so I can tell you a few things. Then of course, there are other things that we'll need an NDA for ;-)
In general, the OSS of the future needs to become much more of an e-commerce/ extranet application than it is right now. A basic list of what customers would like is something like:
1) On demand service creation. Right now, this is a convoluted process in most enterprises.
2) Per project/per application billing. This simplifies cost accounting for bandwidth.
3)Built in, free service level monitoring. (Wouldn't it be nice?)
A carrier, of course, wants huge scalability and security. They also want freedom to choose their own equipment vendors and network designs.
It get's more interesting from here.
There are numerous vendors out there (including the aforementioned) that are trying to put together some parts of a system that does the above. Things, however, get more difficult when the network is multi-vendor. For example, a nice feature that gets mentioned is the capability to reserve bandwidth at a specified Qos for a specific period of time. (Say for H.323 vconferences)
To implement this, aside from security/scalibility considerations, there are network considerations as well. How does one reserve bandwidth this way on todays IP backbones?
Anyway, this is only the beginning. I'm open to comments/questions.
Laz |
