Posted: 04/2001
Keys to the Kingdom
New App Provisioning Architecture Bodes Well for Telecom Channels
By Peter Lambert and Fred Dawson
Amid all the talk about new revenue opportunities bursting into play for service providers of every description, the missing ingredient has been an operations platform through which service providers (SPs) can aggregate, distribute and charge for the customized on-demand packages made possible by broadband IP technology.
But now that the delivery and service-enabling components of this new any-service/anytime model are taking hold commercially, suppliers of next-generation service management systems are coming on the scene with a mind-boggling array of solutions aimed at covering the essential OSS bases for SPs of every stripe, including traditional telecom resellers and agents. The world may still be a long way from making the ultimate dream of the broadband Internet a reality, which is to turn today's IP rivers and tributaries into a seamless high-speed global computer network. But the good news is that, no matter where a SP might sit in the value chain, there now are OSS solutions available that can be expected to evolve fairly painlessly as the new service environment evolves.
"Provisioning for an application infrastructure provider has to touch so many components that you simply have to automate the workflow," says Dwight Krossa, director of product marketing of ISP/ASP hosting for Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com). "Otherwise, you'd have too many [operations] people and not enough profit."
For every customer signed-on to an applications service-rich network, that workflow can involve provisioning hardware resources such as firewalls, application servers, server hardware processor cycles, OS memory, backend databases, load balancing and compression devices, routers, switches and edge access devices. At the same time, OSSs and business support systems (BSSs) must be provisioned to support a whole range of customer care, usage record keeping, billing, network device monitoring, performance analysis, troubleshooting, and other service delivery and business applications.
To make all this possible, some provisioning system vendors propose to build literally hundreds of preconfigured service workflow "libraries" and templates, and even to tune infrastructure resources up and down in real time-based on-performance monitoring data.
With its ProvEn provisioning platform, Emperative Inc. (www.emperative.com), for example, is enabling broadband DSL and cable providers, including Time Warner Inc.'s Road Runner (www.roadrunner.com) service, to automate self-service activation and bandwidth throttling. Through its Broadband Service Provisioning Lab opened last August in Boulder, Colo., Emperative has developed interfaces between its service libraries and a range of infrastructure "knobs," including Redback Networks Inc. (www.redback.com) subscriber management systems, Copper Mountain Networks Inc. (www.coppermountain.com) access multiplexers, Portal Software Inc. (www.portal.com) billing systems, and Micromuse Inc. (www.micromuse.com) fault management systems. The interfaces also extend to web, e-mail and domain name servers of individual vendors or vendor groups such as The Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org), Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com), Netscape Communications Corp. (www.netscape.com) and Openwave Systems Inc. (www.openwave.com)--the combination of Phone.com and Software.com.
"For ASPs, this can create a bridge to network service provider infrastructures," says Emperative marketing vice president Randy Fuller. "If the subscriber management system provides a user with, say, a 1.5-megabit circuit, we provide the arm for the user to reach in and control the bandwidth throttle up to that maximum."
Applying a similar model, Top Layer Networks Inc. (www.toplayer.com) boasts a library of attributes for just under 400 application types, including media streams, packet voice and file transfers. Its data center AppSwitch is designed to handle up to half a million application flows, 64,000 users and 64,000 policies, says network product manager Mark Roy.
According to Roy, by looking inside a series of data flow packets, the AppSwitch discovers information about the app, the user and the user-provider relationship. It then can apply policies to provision network bandwidth--restricting bandwidth for some, assuring premium bandwidth for others--according to app type, source, or destination domain or address.
Further, in partnership with performance management system provider Peakstone Corp. (www.peakstone.com), the AppSwitch creates a feedback loop for real-time analysis and resource tweaking. "Everything we gather about the flow can be useful to performance management analysis by Peakstone, which correlates that info with business objectives, and then sends commands to the AppSwitch for tuning," Roy says. With a service portal on his desktop, he adds, "The user can effectively say, 'This is not enough treble,' and like a graphic equalizer on his sound system, tune the levers until he gets the sound he wants."
A range of vendors are now offering such app-intelligent "knobs" in their per-user provisioning tools and network devices, including Allot Communications (www.allot.com), Arcana Inc. (www.arcana.com), CoManage Corp. (www.comanage.net), Equinox Solutions (www.equinoxsolutions.com), ISPsoft Inc. (www.ispsoft.com), Quarry Technologies Inc. (www.quarrytech.com) and Redback Networks. Support for such knobs within the network infrastructures used by SP sales channels will be vital to SPs' success in delivering exactly what customers want.
Two other vendors automating routine provisioning functions, abridean Inc. (www.abridean.com) and Ellacoya Networks Inc. (www.ellacoya.com), also are focusing on service portal creation and the ability to delegate provisioning authority. Built on Microsoft's Active Directory and Management Console, abridean's Application Provisioning Engine matches requests with user information and granular application information, down to, for example, distinct e-mail server and conferencing server components of Microsoft Exchange.
To provide controls for those components, the system offers distributed administrative user interfaces for independent software vendors (ISVs), ASPs, channel partners, corporate customers and end users. This delegates provisioning authority across the entire ASP value chain, says company president and CEO Sean Sears. "In an environment with millions of users, multiple apps, multiple destinations and varied facilities ownership, the only way for the large ISV to get downmarket is to have a licensing model that supports a distributed, subscription based architecture," says Sears. To achieve that goal, he adds, the system must close the loop across apps, users and network utilization.
Along those lines, Ellacoya's Service Agency system marries subscriber management with per-flow service management. Ellacoya's Service Generation Switches, Business Logic Server, Service Creation Manager and Dynamic Portal Generator are designed to draw from customer profiles using extensible markup language (XML) tags to push portal pages to each end user and then to repopulate the profile with adds, moves and changes. By combining an application with service components, such as bandwidth privileges, the service bundle can be defined. "That bundle icon can then be dragged onto the customer profile and made automatically available to that customer," says product marketing director Bill Clark.
The ultimate goal is to build a unified system that automatically and dynamically builds and provisions a packaged service in response to customer clicks on a service portal icon, "even across multiple data centers and service sources," says Microsoft's Krossa. "Standards-based interfaces are beginning to make that possible by allowing communications between provisioning systems and the applications."
In particular, server operating systems (OSs) and applications are now able to "expose" a single, standard XML interface to any and all provisioning systems--a happy alternative to burdening a server OS with custom-coded software "agents" from every provisioning system vendor, Krossa says. Just as ISV business app developers write to the OS, so now does Microsoft consider Xevo Corp. (www.xevo.com), Portal Software Inc. (www.portal.com) and other OSS app developers "infrastructure ISVs," to which Microsoft must expose common programming interfaces. In turn, Krossa adds, Xevo, in whose partner program Microsoft is a participant, is "helping us to understand what provisioning is about--how best to add a user, add a mailbox, expose this or that interface."
A measure of how powerful the new provisioning-based multiservice OSS concept has become can be seen in the scope of partners in the XevoWorks Partner Program. It includes firewall, router and data center switch maker Cisco; thin client delivery software provider Citrix Systems Inc. (www.citrix.com); server maker and data center integrator Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com); applications developers Great Plains Software Inc. (www.greatplains.com) and Onyx Software Corp. (www.onyx.com); software configuration management provider Marimba Inc. (www.marimba.com); OS, directory, applications and client software provider Microsoft; billing system provider Portal; and app hosting tools provider Progress Software Corp. (www.progress.com).
Xevo's provisioning platform, the Xevo ASP Workbench, accommodates service management and one-touch provisioning automation. Its basic components are designed to serve as a master coordinator of all the provisioning processes executed by its partners' products, according to former Xevo president and CEO Rick Hronicek.
Such coordination is made necessary by the fact that ASPs are serving up specific services to specific "named" users, Hronicek notes. "Unlike a website host, an ASP or a business-to-business extranet host needs to know and define end users and their access and applications privileges; and once you start naming users, you must manage the provisioning of servers, load balancers, databases, operating systems and network resources," he says. That range of systems, Hronicek adds, illustrates a fundamental shift in the conception of what "operating system" means.
"'Operating system' used to mean talking to the hard drive and managing memory," he says. "Now, the network and OS will become a collection of components. If you're accessing applications, the entire operating infrastructure of the ASP must be managed," and with each addition of a new application, server, switch or end user, new information must be shared across subscriber management, provisioning, billing, and other OSSs and BSSs.
According to Hronicek, ASP Workbench has three "touch points" in the ASP infrastructure: infrastructure components through Cisco, Citrix, Compaq, Marimba and Microsoft; OSS/BSS through Portal Software; and the applications themselves through Great Plains, Microsoft, Onyx and Progress Software. That starting set of XevoWorks partners represents "the heartland--a good, strong, horizontal set of applications that addresses server management, applications management and billing management," says Ray Wilkes, director of service provider strategy for Compaq Global Services, "Xevo provides a platform to integrate your application into that core infrastructure."
On this three-way, app-server-OSS/BSS street, Hronicek says, "We enable the OS to know about the apps and the users," and to enable named-user metering and billing. "Where Microsoft is an application provider, with Office or Exchange, our product will meter usage of those apps out of the box, and we're doing the same with Progress Software-based applications," Hronicek says. "We know the user by name--the company, the employee, the application, when he logged on--so we monitor the number of logged-on users, their time logged on, the transactions, and feed that data to Portal."
The partners also plan to preintegrate Microsoft's Active Directory, a storage and lookup engine for information on users and infrastructure components, as well as a repository of policies that guide provisioning of service to each user. Such directory-based coordination of user activity with network and back-office systems will extend to business-level processes, including app license enforcement.
"The ISV's own licensing scheme may or may not dictate how end use is priced, and, especially where there's multiapplication bundling, the ASPs want to pay the ISV less for apps that are used less, which could become similar to Nielsen rating-based TV ad rates," Hronicek says. "Because we operate at the named-user level, we enable that mediation to determine the settlement between ASP and ISV," or between any SP, including agents and resellers, and any supplier of content and applications. Clearly, the flow-through provisioning and network flow monitoring and accounting that go with the evolving ASP OSS model apply as well to the channels in the traditional telecom space who stand to gain as ASPs look for points of contact with end users.
Peter Lambert is editor in chief of a-com magazine. Fred Dawson is vice president of editorial operations for Virgo Publishing telecom division.
