Cisco, Nokia Siemens to help service providers manage networks

Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks entered into an agreement to develop a standards-based telecommunications network management platform that will help service providers manage the increasing complexity of their networks and speed time to market of new services.

The jointly developed Operations Support Systems (OSS) platform will help the entire service provider community better align network capabilities and costs with business demands.

The two companies are committed to long-term cooperation, bringing together Cisco’s strong Internet Protocol (IP) competence and Nokia Siemens Networks’ solid end-to-end telecommunications capability, as well as extensive research and development (R&D) and economic resources from both companies.

As part of the agreement, Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks will deliver a solution that will provide a common end-to-end network view of diverse network elements – across IP and mobile technologies – that are automatically discovered and represented as a virtual network model.

Likewise, the solution will provide a complete view of network resources regardless of platforms, technologies or vendors. The platform will include basic fault, configuration, performance and security (FCAPS) management functionality as well as a variety of common functions, such as data acquisition and network element mediation, which will be utilized by higher-level OSS applications.

Nokia Siemens Networks brings to the collaboration its proven end-to-end telecommunications capability and its out-of-the-box software product, Open EMS Suite by Nokia, which provides capabilities of an element management system (EMS) and can be used to build EMS for various kinds of networks including transport, mobile, and broadband.

Along with its expertise in IP networking, Cisco also brings its Cisco Active Network Abstraction (ANA) management solution to the collaboration. This is already the basis for managing complex multi-vendor networks as well as providing the base platform for new management solutions, such as the Cisco Managed Services Solution.

The broader intent of the collaboration is to provide a basis for helping OSS and other independent software vendors produce or extend their own applications more quickly. Companies such as Amdocs are demonstrating early support and will be leveraging the future technology from Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks to extend their own OSS solutions that assist with issues such as fault management, network provisioning and inventory control.

“Building linkages between Amdocs’ industry-leading OSS applications and the core network and network devices has always been one of the most labour intensive parts of our many deployments,” said Guy Dubois, President, Cramer, Amdocs OSS Division. “The collaboration between Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks promises to dramatically reduce the effort required and will free resources that can be better applied to deliver more value to our customers. This collaboration will allow service providers to deliver the highest quality services more quickly and at even lower cost.”