Another daunting issue for data is migration said Tony Sceales, founder and CTO of Celona. About half of the businesses that Celona surveyed have six major data migration projects every year, with half of those spending 15 percent of their IT budgets on these projects. Yet most rely on technology not designed to handle migration issues. And most can’t afford downtime for large-scale migration projects.
A way to solve this, according to Sceales, is incremental migration, which enables the movement of data without taking systems offline and also provides a manageable way to cleanse data so that bad information gets purged rather than migrating from one system to the next. Using incremental migration enables firms to cleanse data before, during or after the migration without losing any time during the migration process.
Progressive migration enables early awareness of migration issues, according to Sceales. By detecting issues early in the process, firms can help reduce the project overruns that often remain undiscovered until well into the project, said Sceales, citing Bloor Research information.
Ontology Systems, London, also cited the need for improved data migration strategies in its launch of OSS/CAD 2.5, announced at the
Customer churn still remains a big issue in the telecom industry
Cavalier Telephone currently lacks a standardized representation of products across channels (inbound, agent, online, direct), and at the point of ordering, there is limited enforcement of business rules and incomplete capture of the data that is required for accurate quoting and error-free fulfillment. So Cavalier is implementing Convergys’ Product Control Manager to streamline ordering processes and bring new offers to market more rapidly. The system is designed to enforce commercial and technical rules in real time, enables quick modeling of commercial product offerings, integrates via the TMF SID data model, and serves as the single product catalog across all channels.
Silver Sponsor ConceptWave was underwhelmed with the Orlando event, and their VP of Marketing and Business Development, Chun-Ling Woon, was candid in telling us that the "exhibit hall looked sparse ," noting that there were "no new players on the show floor" this time around. Mr. Woon critiqued the timing of the show for being much too late in the year, and opined that the TM Forum has "become self-serving." So why participate at all? "The show offers a central local to set up meetings once a year" according to Mr. Woon.
conference. OSS/CAD is designed to provide a visual, unified model of OSS/BSS data sources.
The newest version includes a new integrated workbench for building OntoPacks, the firm’s functionality "bundles" that can be deployed to a running OSS/CAD installation to extend the runtime capabilities. The newest release also features Cisco router configurations and direct import of complex Excel spreadsheets.
Ontology’s OSS/CAD 2.5 is in use at South African-based converged services provider Internet Solutions and at other yet-to-be disclosed service providers.
Catalog Initiaive Discussed
Service providers are actively deploying centralized product and service catalog solutions, including Cavalier Telephone’s catalog initiative, which was discussed during one of the conference session. According to Convergys Corp., the industry is looking at these solutions to address real business issues such as order fall-out, high cancellation rates and long delivery intervals. During the presentation, Christoph Casati of Cavalier Telephone discussed how his organization is bringing sense to the ‘product data chaos’ by using the TMF SID and a centralized product catalog application.
Comptel, who were energized by their recent Superstar Mobile Star Award from MobileVillage for Comptel Policy Control, told us in Orlando that they were seeing a great deal of interest in the cloud-based services demo inside the Service Model Catalyst project Getting the Telecom to Cloud 9. Comptel participated in this catalyst with Qwest, BT, Progress Software and Network Cadence.
Nakina Systems was on hand, and presented alongside Alcatel Lucent and AT&T on the challenges of parameter management in complex next-gen networks. Nakina’s Solutions Architect Dean Mechlowitz and Alcatel-Lucent’s Principal Consultant Morgan Stern unpacked some of the challenges of managing large scale IMS and VoIP deployments as AT&T Director of VoIP Integration Chris Phelan related ways in which the telco was working with these vendors to overcome some of these complex issues.
Accanto Systems was having a much better year than most of the companies we encountered in Orlando. Excited about their October OEM agreement with network assurance vendor Tollgrade, and expansion with new offices in Malaysia and Singapore, things at Accanto were “going really well!”
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 8
