TMN is keeping an eye on those businesses using the exclamation-marked TMForum Live! to launch products and solutions that affect the management, optimisation and control of the mobile network, or leverage the network to enrich other apps and processes within the operating business. With NFV-SDN also entering the discussions in a major way at the event, the role of analytics and of how OSS fit into NFV management and orchestration are also two key themes.
Here’s four to keep you going so far.
Mycom OSI – understanding quality assurance in NFV
MYCOM OSI has plans to take its monitoring and QoS management capabilities and use them to enable NFV orchestration – so that operators can manage the quality of their hybrid NFV and hardware-specific applications.
So it has announced an NFV solution that automatically directs NFV orchestration actions based on end-to-end service assurance factors, such as faults and QoS degradations.
The solution – based on its ProActor product – is part of the TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept ‘Closing the Loop: Customer Experience, Policy and Virtualisation’ being demonstrated at the Nice conference..
Mycom OSI said that industry standards and solution providers are currently focusing first on the implementation of the VNFs and the NFV management and orchestration environment rather than the complexities of controlling how VNF introduction impacts overall network and service quality.
It said its solution is different because rather than NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) being used solely to make decisions for fulfilment functions, it augments this role and utilises the MANO for operational network quality improvement and assurance purposes. The company said the soluton continually collects and processes very large volumes of Customer and near real-time Service Assurance data from across the entire network, automates cross-domain analysis, and issues preventive and corrective recommendations to the NFV Orchestrator. To close the loop, MYCOM OSI’s solution continues to monitor the resulting performance to determine success or instigate further actions.
As part of providing closed loop monitoring, analysis and recommendations to the hybrid network managers, MYCOM OSI’s solution monitors the performance of the virtual network functions and physical NFV infrastructure they run on and correlates this with the rest of the physical network to provide end-to-end visibility.
The products in MYCOM OSI’s solution for NFV environments include the ProActor policy control and automation solution; PrOptima converged (Fixed/IP/Mobile) Service and Network Performance Management and ProInsight network analytics.
Mounir Ladki, President and CTO of MYCOM OSI, said, “This Catalyst proof of concept demonstrates that CSPs can deploy their NFV environments and maintain network and service quality not just within the NFV environment itself but also in the context of the overall network. But to do this, you need proven solutions that collect and process vast amounts of multi-domain network, service and customer data in near real time and execute sophisticated cross-domain operational processes all within an automated closed-loop process.”
ZTE’s ZXDNA – providing visible network traffic operation and maintenance
ZTE launched a traffic analysis, planning and O&M tool called ZXDNA. Like other tools in the field, ZXDNA extracts information from network management systems (NMS) and displays it in diverse report forms
ZXDNA also enables the user to set automatic alarms on thresholds, generating reports regularly and pushing notifications by email or SMS, so that the user can be alerted of the network traffic trend, load and hotspot problem. This may helpoperators to plan and optimise network structure more efficiently. It also enables operators to establish traffic archives to arrange support for important activities and provide traffic analysis data as a reference for routine network O&M and market operation.
So far, the tool has been deployed and used in Guangdong Mobile (13 cities and the provincial backbone network), Shanghai Mobile, Shaanxi Mobile, Jilin Mobile, Hunan Mobile and Yunnan Mobile. ZTE said the tool can reduce O&M manpower costs by 30 percent.
AsiaInfo – on the road to data nirvana
AsiaInfo is the latest company to attempt to bring real time customer and network data together in a meaningful way – to increase operators’ customer engagement and revenues.
It is launching an engine called Veris Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) that aggregates and real-time contextual information from both network and BSS event sources – allowing operators to respond to customer and network events in real time.
The RTI engine orchestrates analyses information from multiple sources including billing, CRM systems and the data network, adding event processing to orchestrate an appropriate real-time response to a sequence of events from multiple sources.
For example, a low data balance (identified by the charging platform) occurring when the customer is watching a video (identified by Veris C3), could trigger an offer to the customer to purchase a day pass for the video app they are using.
The RTI engine combines Veris C3 with a new Customer Engagement Centre (CEC) which assimilates multiple data feeds to identify each customer’s context – such as the status of their billing account, current orders, recent contact with the operator’s call centre or other channels, and also any activity on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
TEOCO – leveraging analytics for unified service assurance
TEOCO launched Helix, a unified service assurance suite that brings together performance, fault, service and customer experience management capabilities and to deliver real time analytics and machine learning enhancements.
The idea is that Helix will enable CSPs to accelerate their evolution to a Service Operations Center model – the idea of integrating network operations with customer experience to drive a service operations model.
“Helix brings together service assurance with real time analytics and machine learning,” said Shachar Ebel, CTO of TEOCO. “The platform is a leap forward in the ability of service assurance software to offer cross domain solutions that can boost network and service performance, as well as customer quality of experience, while prompting the implementation of predictive automated operations and processes for traditional and virtualized networks (NFV).”
