S2Net - Active Network

S2Net-ActiveNetwork is the Service Activation and Network Reconciliation product set of the S2Net OSS family, combining Data Integrity Management and Flow-Through Service Activation into one cost-effective solution and enhancing your S2Net OSS Suite investment.

Adding S2Net-ActiveNetwork to S2Net-Inventory and S2Net-Automation delivers end-to-end service design, network provisioning and service activation in one tightly integrated OSS, giving Service Providers the benefit of providing their customers with quality services promptly, accurately and at low operational cost.

S2Net-ActiveNetwork communicates directly with your network to operate with the other products in the S2Net OSS Suite in a smooth “closed cycle” (as per the diagram below), covering the entire range of fulfilment and assurance processes.  Its integrated architecture lets you maintain overall data integrity and quality (using the S2Net-ActiveAudit module) while facilitating timely and accurate network activations to reduce overheads (using the S2Net-ActiveService module).

 

An In-Demand Solution

Automatic service activation can help fast-track service roll out, improving operating revenues and cash flows. A vendor- and technology-neutral, inventory-driven activation solution that can be rapidly integrated to any existing OSS and network environment is essential to achieve the maximum return from deploying such a solution.

In addition, the ability to design, assign and activate new customer services with the confidence that planned logical and physical infrastructure is actually available ensures high customer satisfaction and an ability to meet service level targets. As such it is vital that a Service Provider maintains high levels of data integrity between their OSS and network, and that the process is automated to minimize the operational overhead.

S2Net-ActiveNetwork provides a solution to both these problems by:

• Configuring the network in near-real time both via interfaces to Element Management Systems (EMSs), Network Management Systems (NMSs) and to Network Elements (NEs) directly.
• Examining networks, discovering configuration and synchronizing to the network model stored within S2Net-Inventory via the same interface to those systems and NEs

Key Benefits

Reduced Provisioning Costs

High volume, low margin services like DSL, and IP would be too expensive to roll out using traditional provisioning processes. The training and other operational costs would not justify the margins achievable in the very crowded and competitive market.

S2Net-ActiveNetwork can turn-up, change and disconnect services within a matter of moments without any manual intervention. It will respond quickly to the change in service demographics and technology changes driving down the field staff costs and training needs.

Accelerated Service Revenue

Having a healthy cashflow is seen as one of the key factors underpinning the success of the network operators in today’s competitive marketplace. Cashflows and resultant profits are heavily dependent on accelerating revenue and cutting down the cash-cycle.

S2Net-ActiveNetwork can cut down the time to turn up services by eliminating delays, process complexities, and logistic problems associated with the activation process, bringing revenue forward and meeting aggressive customer demands.

In addition, services can be pre-planned and provisioned before the actual turn up time and can be scheduled to activate at a later date. This normalises workload for staff and helps network operators to handle peak demand periods in more predictable manner.

Converged Design/Assign and Activation Processes

With S2Net-Automation, S2Net-Inventory and S2Net-ActiveNetwork, network operators can streamline design/assign and activation - traditionally separate sub-processes within overall order fulfillment. Service planners and designers can now use S2Net-Automation to design customer orders accurately using near real-time network inventory updates in S2Net-Inventory made available from S2Net-ActiveNetwork.

Network utilisation can be improved due to the near real time visibility across the multi-service network. Only one integrated network inventory database is used to design and assign services to customer orders and build activation plans.

Integrated Data Integrity Management

One of the main challenges facing network operators today is the lack of data integrity between the operational network and the logical and physical network inventory.

S2Net’s comprehensive Data Integrity Management improves data quality and hence customer care by providing both accurate provisioning and activation to improve QoS, while automated network synchronisation ensures a ‘closed loop’ of data reconciliation.

Firstly, S2Net-ActiveNetwork via S2Net-ActiveService provides automated configuration of the network, meaning that provisioning problems are removed through a fully-automated, rules-based activation that eliminates human error and its associated costs.

Then, through its S2Net-ActiveAudit functionality, S2Net-ActiveNetwork is able to verify and update the inventory database records as soon as the services and equipment are turned up.

The stringent technical and business validation rules that are built in to S2Net-Inventory can audit these updates against the logical and physical network inventory and ensure data consistency and integrity across all network and service layers.

Even more importantly, the S2Net-Inventory architecture is such that its inbuilt technical and business rules for validation can be customised to suit the individual operator needs to deliver greater automation in data integrity management.

In short, through providing a comprehensive ‘closed loop’ system, S2Net-ActiveNetwork permits operators to apply pro-active data integrity management – rather than relying on reactive data analysis.

Automated Capacity Planning

In many operators a number of domain specific systems keep disparate records of network infrastructure and services, making it virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of network availability and utilisation.

S2Net-ActiveAudit interrogates EMS/NMS/NEs directly to find their configuration details and compares this against the network model managed by S2Net-Inventory. It then returns a report describing the true configuration and highlighting any differences, or optionally performs automated remediation.

In addition, near real time updates both to the network of physical and logical network information through S2Net-ActiveService provides service designers with completely up to date network utilisation views.

Combined with the unique time-based management and auto configuration features available in S2Net-Inventory, designers are better able to plan, design and groom services to maximise network utilisation and get a better return on network infrastructure investment.

By “closing the loop” with the network in this way, the S2Net OSS suite is truly able to offer “just in time” plan and build and hence maximum capacity utilisation.

Interface Rationalisation

Today’s complex OSS/BSS systems typically tie diverse OSS/BSS systems into an integrated view of technical and business processes. The risk of failure will increase with the number of interfaces and so does the cost of maintenance. It is prudent to rationalise interfaces.

With S2Net-Inventory and S2Net-ActiveNetwork, network operators can integrate their provisioning, inventory management and activation platforms into one homogeneous product family and reduce the number of interfaces they have to maintain and support.

The S2Net-ActiveNetwork Plug-Ins can easily expand and upgrade your activation and synchronization capabilities by plugging in new interfaces without disrupting existing services.

Zero Touch End-to-End Process

S2Net-ActiveNetwork can activate and reconcile services without any manual intervention.

The end-to-end process can span from the receipt of the customer order by a CRM system to activating the matrix cross-connects in the required network elements.

With an appropriate message oriented middleware bus and/or a work-flow engine connected to the CRM/Order Management System, S2Net-Automation, S2Net-Inventory and S2Net-ActiveNetwork, the service and network provisioning can be fully automated to become a zero touch end-to-end process. This enables network operators to make significant savings in cost of provisioning and time to provision services.

Additional process improvements come from automated auditing and reconciliation – by a one time configuration of the scope of an audit, S2Net-ActiveNetwork can specify which components from a network element to include in analysis down to the rack, shelf, card or individual port level.

All of these configurations are facilitated through an easy to use Web-based GUI lets you plan, manage and configure your automated activation environment.

Product Architecture

S2Net-ActiveNetwork is a robust and flexible platform that leverages the latest technologies to provide a simple yet powerful integration layer for legacy and evolving networks.

To facilitate openness, scalability and ease of integration, S2Net-ActiveNetwork is built on a J2EE-compliant application server, providing a multi-tiered, scalable and open architecture that is platform independent.

S2Net-ActiveNetwork provides off-the-shelf integration to leading network equipment vendor’s Element Management Systems (EMSs) that implement standards-based interfaces such as TMF814, TL/1, ITU-T CORBA, CMIP and MTOSI-based SOAP/XML Web Services.

Both S2Net-ActiveAudit and S2Net-ActiveService are built on the common S2Net- ActiveNetwork platform, as shown below.