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Happy New Year!
When I am in discussions with potential customers, I sometimes get asked the question, “What else can an EMS do for me other than the obvious?” To which I reply, “It can keep your sales people honest!” Well what I mean is that a well thought out and designed management system can help your sales people substantiate your claims about your product in an elegant and easy to understand manner. To explain it in greater detail, let me share a recent customer experience.
We were approached by a network infrastructure provider who was focused on designing and building massively scalable Ethernet fabric switching solutions for Enterprise, and Internet data centers to help them with their management solution. Their system uses Dynamic Congestion Avoidance to automatically balance traffic for delivering the industry’s highest performance and lowest latency and is aimed at enabling server virtualization, data consolidation, and parallel and cloud computing.
One of the main advantages of their technology was that it was non-blocking, with no packet loss or drop and had ultra low latency and jitter. Before they had a management system, even though they could mathematically show the efficiency of their system, their sales people were unable to explain to their customers, in a convincing manner, the value proposition of their technology. With the help of DNMS (Dhyan Network Management System) advance performance monitoring function they were not only able to obtain real time statistics on latency, jitter, byte and packet loss on a per flow basis but were also able to present that information to their customers in a manner that was visually appealing and easy to understand thereby significantly improving the efficiency of their sales process.
As they say in sales, most customers are from Missouri – the “Show-Me State”! Instead of hearing about the capabilities of your technology they would rather see it. Finally it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and in this highly competitive world it may be the difference in making that positive first impression!
Dhyan Infotech Inc is a software and services company that helps Equipment Vendors differentiate their products in the market place. Dhyan's EMS technology, DNMS (Dhyan Network/Element Management System), is a component based Element Management System, which has been widely deployed by Dhyan's customers at many Service Providers both small and large
If you have questions on EMS or related topic that you would like to get answered or would like to write a guest column in this newsletter, please send an email to ems-energizer@dhyanit.com. This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe
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Multi-Technology Operations Systems Interface (MTOSI)
MTOSI standard is a unified open interface that can be used among multiple types of management systems to provide network and service management. MTOSI standard covers all communication technologies (from layer 1, e.g., SONET/SDH, through higher layer technologies such as VoIP).
MTOSI facilitates application-to-application inter-working, reduces time to deployment, and lowers the cost of ownership of systems.
Current management and support system implementations employ diverse middleware technologies, a reality that is not likely to change in the immediate future. To be widely adopted, MTOSI cannot mandate specific middleware technologies for its implementation. Therefore the MTOSI interfaces are sufficiently abstract to be middleware neutral, yet rigorous enough that vendors can map them quickly to their middleware of choice. The CCV is the common middleware required to implement MTOSI.
CCV is a middleware abstraction that allows MTOSI interfaces to be bound to different middleware technologies as needed. By exploiting the expressive power of Web Services Description Language, MTOSI interfaces are composed of logical and physical definitions.
MTOSI standard offers a number of unique business advantages (1-4) as well as advantages applicable to any well-designed and well-supported interface standard (5-8):
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MTOSI provides a standard interface between different systems for fulfillment and assurance functionality. In effect different instances of the same interface are reused at different reference points.
Benefit: Knowledge can be re-used in the design of systems |
| 2. |
MTOSI uses XML (eXtended Mark-Up Language) based messaging.
Benefit: XML technology is widely accepted and used technology. |
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MTOSI provides rules for versioning and for vendor extensions to the XML messages.
Benefit: When MTOSI is deployed, the server and consumer application ends of the interfaces can be upgraded independently. Also, when several vendors’ equipment is deployed, the proprietary extensions are managed in a consistent manner. |
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MTOSI uses standard communication patterns to support business activities that can be implemented by a range of IT platforms and transport protocols.
Benefit: The underlying platform can be changed the without propagating the change to the applications. |
| 5. |
MTOSI allows service providers to implement management and support systems quickly. For example, without MTOSI, each of the four EMS providers in Figure 1 would need to define and agree upon a common interface (on a pair-wise basis), build the interface and then do interoperability testing.
Benefit: MTOSI lowers the time and costs needed to integrate management and support system software from different suppliers. |
| 6. |
MTOSI is designed to support service provider requirements for an open systems environment.
Benefit: This allows service providers to more easily deploy management and support systems from multiple vendors and to replace existing ones. This increase in choice creates a more competitive environment for service providers, allowing them to choose products that best fit their functional and financial needs. |
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MTOSI encourages system integrators to pre-integrate products that are MTOSI-compliant.
Benefit: This results in lower up-front costs and faster deployment for service providers. |
| 8. |
MTOSI helps carriers to avoid wholesale replacements of legacy systems and instead allows them to introduce and integrate point applications that can address new solutions and services.
Benefit: Allows a service provider to preserve its investment in legacy systems while still addressing the need to manage new technologies and services. |
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Today’s service providers are faced with a number of issues that are preventing them from rolling out services in an efficient and cost effective manner. While attempting to create sophisticated services, service providers must contend with complex systems built from multiple competing technologies delivered by different vendors. Instead of focusing on the delivery of new services, service providers are forced to deal with vendor integration complexity leading to unnecessary integration costs, reduced feature sets, and ultimately delay in revenue generation
A service provider had a requirement to integrate management system software (developed using .NET framework), with a J2EE based OSS (Operations Support System) application. Integrating two systems with different technologies without MTOSI would have posed several challenges such as:
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Each system provider had to work with the other to design a common interface, build it and test the interface as well |
| 2. |
Whenever a new system had to be integrated with the service providers management system, the same integration steps had to be done for each integration which is repetitious, time consuming, and cumbersome. |
| 3. |
Interoperability testing would have to be done whenever individual systems were upgraded |
These challenges were overcome by introducing MTOSI interface support for both systems. In addition since MTOSI is based on web technologies such as JMS, XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Service Description Language (WSDL) it provided the following benefits:
| 1. |
Since the above mentioned tools are used widely in the industry, they have cost advantages over the use of specialized management technologies such as Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). |
| 2. |
Management systems can be integrated with other OSS systems such as Billing, Service Activation, Inventory Management etc., quickly and with ease. |
| 3. |
Each system can be upgraded independently without significantly affecting other systems. Therefore overall network downtime is minimized |
By adding MTOSI interface to some of the core functionalities of the management system such as Inventory retrieval interface for the configuration service, Device discovery and provisioning interface, Alarm monitoring interface with support for coarse-grained alarm retrieval operations for Fault Service, Topic based publisher and subscriber notifications for the Notification Service, Service Activation interface, and Billing interface etc., the overall cost of integration with the existing OSS systems was cut down dramatically.
By basing the platform around MTOSI, the service provider was able to integrate the systems quickly, have them interoperate seamlessly and deliver differentiated services in a cost effective manner, setting itself apart from the competition.
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If you have any comments or questions or would like to write a guest column in the energizer, please send an email to
ems-energizer@dhyanit.com
This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe.
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© 2009 Copyrights Reserved. Dhyan Infotech |
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| Participation in trade shows: |
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February 2 - 4, 2009
Miami Beach Convention Center,
Miami, FL
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March 22 - 26, 2009
San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA
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March 30 – April 2, 2009
Gaylord Palms, Orlando, FL
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March 30 – April 3, 2009
Silicon Valley, CA
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April 1 - 3, 2009
Las Vegas Convention Center,
Las Vegas, NV
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What methodologies and tools are available for making an Operations Support System or a Management System MTOSI compliant? |
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MTOSI is a TeleManagement Forum (TMF) initiative that has gained significant support from software tool vendors and service companies since its inception.
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There are several tools available to cover the entire MTOSI lifecycle including modeling, development and deployment. IONA has embraced MTOSI and the company's MTOSI Toolkit for Artix provides a variety of developer resources that leverage the MTOSI standard to allow seamless integration of Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) as the foundation of new business initiatives.
Basic development of MTOSI implementation can also be achieved using industry standard toolkits such as BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, AXIS, Sun’s Java RI, Glassfish, Iona Artix and XML tools, such as XMLSPY.
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Dear Ram, |
It gives me great pleasure to thank you and your team for the flexibility and excellent support that your team has shown in the development of our management application.
During the due diligence phase we had evaluated several different options that were available to us in the development of a management application to manage our devices. As you know our wireless devices are very advanced and sophisticated therefore we were keen that the management system be capable of exposing those advanced features and capabilities in a very friendly and easy to use manner. After a fairly detailed evaluation process we chose to go with DNMS (Dhyan Network Management System) technology since we felt that DNMS technology not only supported almost all the advanced features that we were looking for in a management system but was very intuitive and easy to use. In addition we were pleasantly surprised at the speed with which you are able to provide us with the proof of concept of our management System using your DNMS technology and were able to respond to our requests.
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Sincerely,
Executive Vice President
Chief Technology Officer |
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