S2Net - Automation
Our flagship product S2Net-Automation is an intuitive, policy-driven, rules-based system that intelligently, accurately and automatically transforms service orders into network designs.
S2Net-Automation is the only service fulfilment software to offer a truly automated solution that eliminates the traditional manual service design bottleneck.
Sitting as an overlay to your existing systems, S2Net-Automation provides a single point for all service to network configuration. The resulting design tasks required to implement the customer’s services, which may span across multiple technologies including IPTV and triple play through to traditional voice and data, are passed to a workflow system for orchestration.
And because our solution is inventory-agnostic you have the flexibility to leverage your existing inventory systems, or deploy Fastwire’s own inventory solution S2Net-Inventory, or use your existing inventory systems in conjunction with S2Net-Inventory to achieve low-risk forward-looking inventory system rationalisation.
Features
Simplifies Business Workflows
S2Net-Automation’s policy based, rules-driven approach to network design eliminates the problems experienced by task-based products unable to cost-effectively manage complex design policies covering multiple systems. By providing a single control point for all physical and logical elements of network design, S2Net-Automation effectively streamlines your business workflows. Once defined the policies do the thinking for you, prioritising the most efficient use of your network infrastructure for all network domains and across multiple inventory systems.
Integrates with Different Inventory Systems
Because S2Net-Automation can operate over multiple inventory systems you have a single, consolidated view of your entire network infrastructure allowing you to seamlessly aggregate network capacity and simultaneously design services across one or more networks. This feature is particularly attractive for providers transitioning to Next Generation infrastructure or consolidating multiple networks as it does not force a high-risk large-scale data migration into a single inventory system.
Intelligent Network Design
Fastwire’s policy-driven network design means service design capabilities are modelled just once, with subsequent service instances using the pre-defined policies that have been configured in the system. By capturing 'enterprise-approved' best practices the system ensures that future designs leverage this information, enforces established business policies in a repeatable manner, and ensures the most efficient use of your network capacity.
Key features of our intelligent network design include:
- The ability to intelligently handle change orders.
- The ability to identify and retain information on capacity shortfalls to enable forward planning.
- A flexible modular approach that allows you to complement your existing OSS system by combining your current modules with ours.
Lights out Automated Design
S2Net-Automation is the only service provisioning software to offer a true “lights-out” capability. Once the policy rules for a service have been defined, each time your customer requests that particular service, it can be automatically provisioned from a single point and click interface. What’s more, S2Net-Automation is fully scalable which means the same level of “one-touch” automation can be applied to both high-volume and high-value services.
Customer Controlled Configuration
S2Net-Automation's policy rules are defined in metadata. The defined design policies represent a product offering that can be changed by business users through the product’s web-based interface, and are recorded within S2Net-Automation as a library of components called Design Products. Within each Design Product the customer further defines one or more Design Models each representing a valid network design policy for the underlying network services associated with the product. These Design Models may be assigned a priority where the highest priority Design Model represents the most preferred network design approach. Each Design Model also has temporal properties allowing for design elements to change over time. In combination, a Design Models powerful temporal and priority features, enables the service provider to efficiently manage both the customer-facing evolution of product offerings and the network-facing evolution of underlying network technology on either a network-wide or regional basis.
Importantly with this approach, the service provider is able to control the process for rapidly introducing new or amending the design rules for existing products as may be required to meet competitive challenges within the marketplace or field trial new product offerings. Network planners and designers can directly implement those changes in a timeframe that suits the business priorities. There is no dependence on any internal or external (vendor) software development lifecycle to modify or deploy changes to the policies. Furthermore, if the business rules underlying a service need to be changed, an individual policy can be modified without causing a cascading effect that requires other policies to also be re-worked.
As the library of Design Models is built over time, the potential for reuse increases dramatically, to the point where it is possible to introduce new products very rapidly by combining and reusing pre-packaged, tested and proven design policies.
Key Benefits
Faster Time to Revenue – highly automated, efficient processes, which shortens service design times
Reduced Costs – eliminate errors and avoid costly rework with instantaneous, validated automated network designs.
Seamless Network Transition - leverage existing inventory products, design across any network – legacy or new as you transition to Next Generation Networks.
Consistent Network Designs - ensure consistent design through intelligent service design capabilities using pre-defined built-in rules that can be aligned to your evolving network capabilities.
Shorter Time to Market - make new product offerings and services available quickly with flexible, configurable policies that align with your ever-changing business needs.
Rapid Return on Investment - by leveraging your investment in existing OSS systems.
Increase Customer Satisfaction - ensure service designs meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and quality of service (QoS) metrics while simultaneously improving the customer's quality of experience (QoE).
Modules
The S2Net-Automation suite comprises the following modules:
- S2Net-Broker: Records, validates and decomposes all parts of a network request into its constituent service requests that are allocated to the appropriate design modules
-
Automated Design Modules: To perform the design of the network components, includes:
- S2Net-Designer: Delivers automated path design for Layer 1, Layer 2 and Ethernet Services
- S2Net-IPDesigner: Performs automated design for IP networks, including Address Pool and VLAN management
- S2Net-Diversity: Maintains diversity constraints between services and automatically highlights diversity breaches during forward network planning
- Third Party Design: Existing (or third-party) modules being used to perform automated design in some parts of the network.
- S2Net-WorkInstructions: Manages the creation and status of the events required to implement the design within the network.
Product Architecture
Architecture highlights of S2Net-Automation include:
- Fully implemented on the J2EE platform allowing the benefits of scalability and reliability offered by this platform
- Customer data maintained using ORACLE
- Configuration data maintained as XML
- Easily configurable graphical user interface which can be readily changed to the desired customer look and feel
- Information security – secure access is provided for the operations involved in network policy maintenance to prevent incorrect network updates
- Third party design modules integration allows for the incorporation of design modules to support technology types or services not supported by the core S2Net-Automation product.