What is special about OSSera?

We can look at multiple key differentiators with OSSera:

• The Technology and Architecture
• The Standards Alignment
• The Team of Experts

But fundamentally it is the Service Management approach.  OSSera has a unique approach which is different from what others are saying in the market.

What are others saying?

By referencing the TMF eTOM we've simplified the map for the sake of discussion.  Other traditional solutiions are represented below and positioned in black arrows:

• horizontally in the Resource Domain and Service Domain.  
• vertically in the Strategy, Infrastructure, Product (SIP) and Operations business process domains.

What we see in the industry is a wide array of solutions that CSPs have already installed or can purchase from various OSS vendors.  There are traditional bottom-up resource management products including:

• Inventory
• Fault Management
• Performance Management
• Probes and Agents 

All provide some key functionality at the resource level.  Some have extended up in the last decade into the Service Management domain but still have not connected the dots very well.  Each is still a silo'd solution and it is very difficult to manage services end-to-end.  Probes and Agents typically provide metrics at the end-user level (i.e.: mobile wireless smartphone, PC, or home IPTV service) valuable for Customer Experience Management yet may not provide the core end-to-end view into a complex service offering.  Probes and Agents do provide a top-down approach to service management through the customer experience.

What is OSSera's Approach?

OSSera is less bottom-up or top-down but more

• left to right...
• SIP Planning to Operations.  
• This focus is less managing every single resource and more every single service.  
• The focus is less fault versus performance management to more service management
• Less Inventory Management but leveraging inventory data to create nodes, node groups, and network paths which are critical to a Service Sequence.
• Not just Service Impact but also Service Sequence and Service Topology first

OSSera enables SIP:

• Strategy - What Services are most important and have the greatest ARPU?
• Infrastructure - What nodes, node groups and network paths impact those Services?
• Product - What Service Sequence Diagrams and Topology Diagrams are required to model these complex services?

then OSSera enables Operations... both SIP and Operations in a Unified Data Model (UDM) 

The OSSera approach involves a primary focus on the Service Management Domain and Service Planning tools.  These rich Service Specification and Catalog planning tools allow a planner to create service impacting nodes, node groups, and network paths which are glued together with a Service Sequence, Topology, and Impact diagram for critical Customer-Facing and Network-Facing Services.

Then everything is modeled and stored in the Unified Data Model (UDM) connecting the points across all services.

Also the UDM is the glue between organizations from the SIP Planning teams to the Operational stakeholders.  All service diagrams, node groups, nodes, and network paths are now accessible to the Operation teams with real-time alert status indicators.  Real-time events, threshold crossing alarms, as well as KPI/KQI metrics are available to the Operational teams to determine Service Problem, Service Quality, and Service Impact Analysis.

This is the fundamental difference with OSSera's solution:

• Connecting the Dots across Service and Resource Management silos
• Connecting the Dots across SIP to Operational organizations

Download our latest Case Study where we are managing over 2000+ wireless and broadband services for the largest mobile service provider in Thailand.

Image Source: TMF MWA 2011

Don't reinvent the wheel...

With relief a Tier 1 Communications Service Provider (CSP) recently said to us, “It is good you are not trying to rebuild the traditional bottom-up network-centric  Manager of Managers...  we don’t want another fault management system...”

“Don’t reinvent the wheel...”

Traditional Fault Management:

Fault Management systems collect events from various network elements and Elements Management Systems.  Various FM solutions filled a need in the 90’s as the dot com bubble expanded and CSPs rapidly built out their networks.

They all have similar approaches:

• Collect events from various network resources, via multi-protocol adapters/probes and process them into a large bucket... 
• then apply de-duplication, suppression, correlation, and filtering... sometimes some topology or pattern based correlation... 
• or some table based look up for root cause analysis... 

Falling Short

Often deployments never reach their full potential... all they do is pool events, provide some filtering upon the events and/or alerts in a Manager of Managers (MOM).  Operators are still struggling with how to determine service impact and service quality.

Open Source solutions

Today the age of the MOM’s have evolved as now others have jumped into the fray through the last decade with open source solutions.  But many offer the same thing with an open source twist.  These open source solutions seemed to have merely reinvented the wheel and added an open source business model.  They all have network adapters/probes, alert displays, and now communities of open source users.

But do these MOM’s really solve the problem of planning and operating today’s complex services?

Enabling Business Transformation

In our discussions with Service Providers and Systems Integrators around the world we keep hearing the same problems and challenges... These OSS solutions are falling short.

Reinventing the wheel was never our goal.  Today’s wireless, broadband, cloud, and content service providers demand innovation for business transformation.

We approach the problem by first understanding the services.  What are the services? 3G, 4G, Leased-line... then what are the Value-Added-Services on-top? cloud services? content services?  We plan a service end-to-end which connects the dots between Resource-Facing Services and Customer-Facing Services.

OSSera is not here to reinvent the wheel.  OSSera can hover over existing FM, PM, Signaling Probes, Agents, inventory, and gather the data to map it against Service Models that connect the dots between the Resources and Services. 

Meet and Greet

We plan to be at TMF's Management World Americas - November 7th - 10th, 2011

Follow us on twitter to synch up with us during the event.

We want to help you transform your business.

Andrew

We spoke to a Tier 1 Communication Service Provider recently and in summary we heard the following:

• There are many bottom-up solutions - I have a problem in my network, I have to fix it, but I don't know what service is impacted?
• There are many top-down solutions - I have a service problem but I don't know why?
• But no one has really been able to connect the dots and tell me the root cause when a service fails.

When we discussed how services are defined today...the service provider then said, "We do have a lot of EVPs!"... then he clarified:

• E = Excel
• V = Visio
• P = Powerpoint

If MS Excel, Visio, and Powerpoint are how we plan our services today... is this the best we can do?

Excel... Visio... Powerpoint - great tools for capturing data, great tools for illustrating pictures, great tools for communicating ideas...

BUT

Can they transform your business?

Can they transform your strategy, infrastructure, and product planning?

Can they transform your operations?

What if you could import a MS Excel spreadsheet and/or Visio diagram of a new Value-Added-Service into a solution which transformed this information into a Service Sequence Diagram and the solution automatically created a Service Topology... then allowed you to model Service Impact and provided a way to populate an operations system for Service Impact and QoS Monitoring seamlessly.

What if all this could be unified across planning and operations...

connecting the dots from top-down to bottom-up...

What if you could transform your business?

What if?....