In the past month there have been heavy chatter on single platforms for managing various networks. This is focused mainly within the wireless industry, however there are a few industries that uses the term such as in the restaurant business or about computer OS as written by Hugo Ortega a few days ago or blogging capabilities. Six years ago there was discussions in using single platform databases for SOX compliance at the same time that the NoSQL movement started appearing to cope with the demand and specifically driven by the growth of social networks.
I would like to focus on networks, in particular wireless networks since it is an area where there are multiple vendors, platforms and solutions used by a network operator. In a typical wireless network operators, let's say a network with GSM (2G), UMTS (3G), LTE (4G) in its operation will have more than 3 RAN and CN vendors, most likely more than 10 transmission network vendors... and more vendors relating to operation support systems, business support systems and many other parts of an average operator organization. In most cases today each vendor will have its own way of managing and reporting their part in the network. The operator then is left with putting it all together from management, operations, reporting to optimization. The challenges here if not the problems are:
• Normalizing the real network performance across multiple vendor platforms.
• Matching the detailed technical reports to management reports
• Finger pointing amongst the vendors on where the discrepancies are
• Correctness of information, hence network performance
• Heavy resource requirement to get the job done
In the last two years the preferred solution seems to be having one platform to manage network performance and feed that to network optimization with the ultimate goal of Self Organizing Network (SON). The single platform then is supposed to gather data from various sources such as network recordings, NMS logs, OSS performance, drive test, probe logs, configuration dumps, and others. The platform then should correlate all this data, generate reports and if tied to SON, optimize the network. There are challenges of course in having a single platform:
• Accessing all data sources with various formats either directly or through repositories. Most vendors seem to like changing their formats for every updates they do.
• Large volume of data to be parsed, processed, correlated and reported
• Constantly evolving requirements by an operator based on new services, new technologies and subscriber development
There are a few solutions out there for a single platform such as ActixOne from Actix, Wireless Explorer's Unified Platform, and a few others. The question is, does it work? Are there other single platform systems available today?
Do you think it’s possible to implement a true single platform? What will it take?
3 comments:
Ian, I really agree with you. Besides the situation that you describe there is the other problem that every vendor is having their own information silo so trying to push for a single vendor solution for every platform.
The same situation happens on Corporate networks. Here there is a solution that takes a good aproach to the situation: NetMRI by Infoblox. Originally it had a pretty good approach to it but now they are moving to another direction but it is worth taking a look.
Right now we are offering this type of service for corporates in order to optimize the multi-vendor network but still a long way to change customer approach to network management and monitoring.
Any ideas as how to change this?
Thanks Daniel. Changing customer perspective is not the easiest one, considering that they have the same processess since they started their network. The best way is to work with new networks, its like working with a blank canvass and you can paint any picture you want. It takes time before success with new operators translate to usage from well established operators.
In wireless networks its a different story since most operators today are trying to do this unified platform manually using a spreadsheet coupled with a SQL database.
Like in any business to change the old approach to a better one, real value needs to be demonstrated and that can only be done through trials and actual deployments. The direction would need to come from the top who understands the added value of unified platform accross the board.
Both of you Ian and Daniel are so right on those points. I'm glad I have read this blog.
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