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I’m not saying anything new, of course, but you’re not locked into the legacy SONET increments of bandwidth, which is one of the significant differences in building your service offerings and allowing customers to grow with the services you have.
TY:
What are the tradeoffs for that? That flexibility comes at what cost?
Rabii:
I think, at least early on, the cost was
that Ethernet in the metro wasn’t a
wide-area technology, so it took some
time for the operations elements to
mature to the level of SONET. Back
when we first started, there weren’t
many people who understood how to
manage that technology. It was a lot of
telco guys looking at each other saying
“I don’t know Ethernet. I’m not a
packet guy. I’m a SONET/TDM guy.”
That’s changed with the amount of
investment with the amount of money
that manufacturers have put into the
hardware and the software, the
overarching management platforms.
Like I said, Lightpath made some
fortuitous technology decisions back in
the day, and those included going with
Atrica products (now a part of Nokia-
Siemens Networks) that had an
advanced management system, that
had something resembling a level of
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“Lightpath, through some wise technology choices, had a strong showing from 2005 to today.” |
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provisioning and support platform
options dwindle rapidly, and the
features of the platforms go way down.
I’d love to have a platform that I could
tie into my OSS that I could do what I’ll
call my network design in and have,
essentially flow-through provisioning.
I’d want my circuit designers to be able to do their work, and then to have a system that’s able to talk to a Juniper box, a Cisco box, an Alcatel-Lucent box or a Ciena Ethernet platform. I’d want to be able to talk to all of those and have the same richness of features, and I don’t feel like there’s any platform out there that can do that.
The equipment manufacturers are, quite honestly, disincented to do that because they want you to marry yourself to their platform, and they don’t want to make any room for you to bring in other vendors, because it hurts them on the pricing side, or at least cuts into your spend. I get it.
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sophistication that rivaled many of the
TDM platforms of the time, including
point-and-click provisioning and so-
forth. That made it an easier jump to
make.
TY:
To what extent do you feel that OSS/BSS plays are responding to those provisioning needs? Is it becoming easier to find the specific needs of Carrier Ethernet providers addressed by support software vendors?
Rabii:
You know, that’s a pet peeve of mine,
and I don’t want to take us too far
down that track, but since you asked, I
do think that the companies that have
invested in this have not done as good
a job as they could to make
provisioning easy and simple, the way
the carriers want it. I think in some
ways, they’ve done an acceptable job
of making their own platforms
manageable within their own OSS, like
if we’re talking about a Cisco selling a
management platform to manage Cisco
devices. I think that the big issue is
that I, for one, am a big believer in
standards. Then you have power over
your vendor choices and you’re not
locked in to any one thing. You can do
your best to insure against one vendor
falling down. Once you get into the
multi-vendor environment, especially in
the Ethernet space, I think your
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TY:
This is really good feedback, because a portion of our readership is made up of those very vendors, and it should be incumbent upon them to develop those very solutions. Do you feel like the issue is on the hardware side more than the software side?
Rabii:
It’s hard for me to know. I’d like to understand what the hang-ups are, and it varies. The interface between hardware and software varies, and not everyone is on the same page, which is part of the problem. But also, there’s such a diversity of hardware options out there that for a third-party to come in and pitch to me to spend some large sum of money on their system, and have them tell me that they’ll come in and not only build what I want, but also stay up to date with all of the hardware and software types that come out from hardware manufacturers who may or may not be cooperative with this vendor is difficult. I understand that there are all sorts of real-world complexities in developing a perfect system. I just haven’t seen anything particularly great .
The third party software providers have done a great job in doing cross-platform alarm management and correlation for faults, but in terms of the additional features required to provision and actively manage devices, that’s where they fall off a little bit.
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