Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Customers

OSS NewsWatch

By Alana Grelyak

Plenty of exciting things happened in the telecom world between mid-May and mid-June. We’ve got several news releases that came from Telemanagement World in Nice, amongst plenty of other tidbits that we found newsworthy. Here’s the news for your July issue of Pipeline.

Axiom Systems took an opportunity in Nice, France to announce their launch of AXIOSS® Active Catalog, “the industry’s first solution to enable CSP’s to adopt a closed-loop approach to service fulfilment.” The new product works along with the V6 version of the AXIOSS product suite. Axiom says that Active Catalogue “provides an end-to-end solution for the rapid introduction and management of complex and bundled services.”

Clarity, an OSS business process automation company, has signed an agreement with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to enable TCS to “resell Clarity’s Next Generation OSS to customers worldwide.” The agreement also includes provisions for lab implementation of Clarity’s licences, skills development of Clarity software, and a joint marketing effort.

T-Online France has chosen Comptel Corporation’s Provisioning and Activation solution to aid in the fulfilment of T-Online’s triple-play services. T-Online France offers internet services under the name “Club Internet,” and felt that they needed to replace their existing solutions in order to keep up with the growth of their triple-play services.

In other Comptel news, Comptel Corporation has announced the Comptel Inventory mediator, “a new dynamic way of collecting information about the network to improve the accuracy of the data held in a network inventory.”

Sigma Systems has announced the release of Service Management Platform 4.0 (SMP), an upgrade of its previous service management platform. SMP 4.0 provides “a new high performance J2EE-based, BPEL-compatible workflow engine that addresses today’s new demands as well as providing the inherent flexibility to support any type of service…” Sigma plans to make SMP 4.0 generally available in the third quarter of 2007.

Also in Sigma news, Canadian telecommunications carrier Telus has completed its deployment of Sigma’s OSS service management solution for wireless voice and data services. Telus will be integrating SMP, the Sigma Service Topology Manager, the Sigma Service Creation Toolkit, and the Sigma Service Profile Manager.

A new report by Aberdeen Group shows that telecom organizations that order and inventory their software before major network transitions are more likely to

A new report by Aberdeen Group shows that telecom organizations that order and inventory their software before major network transitions are more likely to succeed.

succeed. Joe Basili, Aberdeen Group’s Research Director, said that “Our survey found that 60 percent of organizations should have performed a better assessment before undertaking their network transition. Only 21 percent of laggards completed network transitions on time, or ahead of plan compared to 100 percent of Best-in-Class organizations.”

In the billing solutions arena, Comptel has announced that it is launching Comptel Interconnect Billing Solution “to help service providers settle charges with other service providers for using each other’s networks and services.” It provides “open interfaces, including a web-based easy-to-use GUI, and XML-based interfaces to other systems…” Finish service provider AinaCom has already launched the Interconnect Billing Solution for its international and domestic service offering.

In the world of mergers, Aepona and Appium have combined to meet the needs of the growing market for service delivery platforms. The new company will operate under Aepona’s name and existing Universal Service Platform banner.

Sprint Nextel is acquiring Northern PCS at a total cost of $312.5 million, and while it’s still awaiting regulatory approval, the sale should be completed in the third quarter of 2007.

Alltel has announced that it is being acquired by two private equity firms. The total deal will be worth $27.5 billion, $24.8 billion for the company itself and $2.7 billion in debts.

Due to population swells, telecom providers in Alberta, Canada have implemented a 10-digit dialing system in the 403 and 780 area codes, similar to the one that is being implemented in British Columbia. As of September 12, 2008, Alberta customers will have to dial area codes on even local calls.

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