NICE, France -- An estimated three to four percent of service provider revenues are spent on Operation Support Systems. Many sources report over 50% of that investment is spent on application integration. This tremendous integration cost is due in part to a lack of OSS integration standards.

TeleManagement World (TMW) Nice 2005 will mark the launch of a new TMF integration standard – the Multi-Technology Operations Systems Interface (MTOSI). This standard builds upon the successful Multi Technology Network Management (MTNM) CORBA/IDL interface and extends this work to support XML/Web Service interactions between various types of Operations Systems (The components that make up an OSS).

Lack of the appropriate standards has long prevented service provider systems from being able to manage a heterogeneous network in a consistent and cost effective manner. In their absence OSS architectures have relied upon multiple custom integrations. These, in turn, have led to inflexible platforms which have proved very expensive to maintain and upgrade.

Increasingly, operators are looking to implement more flexible and cost effective operational platforms to support key business drivers such as the implementation of new IP services and greater operational efficiencies. End to end monolithic silos incorporating hardwired business logic are being replaced by horizontal layers of end-to end flow-through systems from customer facing systems at the top to the element management systems nearest the network, in which each layer manages its corresponding data and processes and communicates to the layers directly above or beneath it. This leads to the enormous business benefit of being able to separate the business logic from the massive technical complexity at the network level.

To date one of the greatest challenges to being able to achieve this abstraction at the OS level has been the requirement to communicate and manage many different sets of vendor technologies. One of the main inhibitors to overcoming this challenge has been the lack of standards supporting both the interface from an OS to an EMS and also that between OSs.

The greatest overall benefit of the MTOSI standard is to begin to standardize those interfaces and thus facilitate faster integration between the OSs and the network. For the operator this translates immediately into tangible business benefits such as reduced integration times, reduced integration costs and risks. For systems integrators and software vendors, MTOSI will enable the rapid assembly of Operation Support Systems from heterogeneous products.

In the first release of the MTOSI standard (1.0) the following functionality will be supported:

At TMW there will be a couple of opportunities to see how MTOSI works in practise. In one demonstration, Nortel and Cramer will be demonstrating an MTOSI based adaptor they have produced to connect Nortel's Optical Network Manager® to Cramer's inventory management product. Using an MTOSI specified XML adaptor, Cramer’s ResouceManager® is connected to Nortel’s Optical Network Manager® NMS. The MTOSI adaptor enables reconciliation between the inventory and the network and effectively provides a number of Nortel device models ‘out of the box’. This tested pre-integration has immediate potential business benefits in terms of reduced deployment times and also reduced development and maintenance costs.

In the another demonstration, Telcordia® Granite Inventory OS retrieves network resource inventory from the Siemens NetViewer® Element Management System (EMS) and the Lucent Navis® OMS (also an EMS). The Lucent VitalSuite® Integrated Service Assurance system retrieves all the needed inventory information from Telcordia Granite Inventory OS and then correlates against a collection of active alarms retrieved from the Lucent Navis OMS. The Siemens network is comprised of microwave network elements supporting PDH and SDH signals. The Lucent STM-64 MS Spring network is comprised of four LambdaUnite® network elements.

MTOSI represents an important new standard for improving OSS integration and promises some very important and immediate benefits in terms of reducing costs, reducing risks and allowing operators to implement multi-vendor architectures.

TeleManagement Forum