SUPERCOMM, ATLANTA, GA -- June 9, 1998 -- Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced the Cisco Service Management system, an integrated suite of management solutions that enable service providers to quickly plan, provision, monitor and bill for a diverse set of differentiated network services such as virtual private networks (VPNs), Internet telephony and electronic commerce. The Cisco Service Management (CSM) applications are specifically designed to meet the reliability, scalability and performance requirements demanded by service providers to meet growing customer expectations.
"Service providers are challenged by the exponential growth of the Internet, deregulation and intense competition," said Herb Madan, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Network and Service Management Business Unit. "To profit in this environment, service providers need to offer new, value-added services, deploy them quickly and automate their processes wherever possible. The Cisco Service Management System enables service providers to meet these requirements while at the same time scaling the performance and reliability of their network infrastructure to meet the increasing expectations of their customers."
CSM provides end-to-end service management across an integrated Internet Protocol (IP), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Frame Relay (multitechnology), multivendor network. This integrated service management system provides the ability to provision and operate these previously diverse network technologies as a single service-oriented network. The CSM Web-based interface supports customer-administered services, improving customer responsiveness and reducing service provider operating costs.
CSM management solutions address the four aspects of the service delivery life cycle: Service Planning, Multiservice Provisioning, Service Operations and Billing. The CSM applications can be deployed together to support integrated Layer 2/Layer 3 (multitechnology) solutions like quality-of-service (QoS), VPNs and Internet telephony, or in a modular fashion to support service offerings like ATM or Frame Relay. Each CSM application has a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate service automation and enable it to be easily integrated into existing operations support systems (OSSs) or augmented by third-party solutions.
Planning Profitable Networks
The Cisco Service Planning Center enables service providers to plan, create and modify the network infrastructure that enables service delivery. Key functions include capacity planning, network modeling and design, "what-if" analysis, business modeling and resource auditing. Other capabilities include configuration integrity checks, security audits, performance management, failure analysis and policy management. Integrating the planning process across multiple technologies provides a unique view into current and future network topologies and assists in establishing and maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cisco Planning Center products, service providers can quickly plan new service additions such as IP VPNs and Internet telephony to assess the impact of these services on the existing network infrastructure, optimize configurations for efficient service delivery and plan for additional capacity.Rapid, Error-Free Provisioning
The Cisco Provisioning Center makes delivering services to subscribers quick and easy with a rapid, error-free means of provisioning services across a multitechnology, multivendor network infrastructure. By integrating with a service order management system, Cisco Provisioning Center dramatically reduces the costs and time-to-market issues associated with service deployment by using flow-through service provisioning. For example, Cisco Provisioning Center provides powerful capabilities to automatically map a multitechnology VPN service to various underlying QoS parameters including Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) and Committed Access Rate (CAR) in Layer 3 and Available Bit Rate (ABR) and Constant Bit Rate (CBR) services in Layer 2 ATM.Another unique feature of Cisco Provisioning Center is a service validation step that is tightly integrated into the multiphase commit process. This automated step ensures that a requested service such as premium Internet access can be provided by the network prior to committing it to deployment. This reduces rollbacks and ensures the operational integrity of the service provisioning process while enabling rapid, error-free service deployment. This automated step is essential for "self-service" provisioning by customers through a Web interface.
For dial and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service offerings, the Cisco User Control Point (UCP) is a service policy administration system that dynamically binds individual subscribers to network policies and services, enabling the rapid turn-up and profitable operation of personalized IP services. UCP's distributed, fault-tolerant architecture integrates authentication, authorization, accounting, roaming and address management services into a service provider's operations support systems.
"Cisco's Service Management System is a unique blend of TMN standards compliance that will appeal to the operations groups of facility-based carriers, and revenue-generating service creation support that will appeal to service providers of all types, at all levels," said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation. "CSM's flow-through architecture provides for multivendor service creation, provisioning and operations support in a way that lets carriers build new services while leveraging their existing infrastructure. The architecture is particularly strong as a foundation for VPN services, which cut across multiple OSI layers and present special challenges in creating and supporting customer network services."
Profitable Service Operations
Cisco Info Center is a real-time, high performance service-level monitoring and diagnostic tool that provides network fault monitoring, trouble isolation and real-time service-level management for multitechnology, multivendor networks. Cisco Info Center is designed to help operators focus on important network events, offering a combination of filtering, alarm reduction rules, flexible alarm viewing and partitioning. It enables service levels to be specified and monitored, providing valuable insight into SLA conformance. Customer, VPN and administrative partitioning and distribution of information are also supported by Cisco Info Center, further enhancing service providers' ability to profitably manage the network and extend SLA monitoring capabilities to their customers. For example, a fault on an ATM trunk or change in an ATM grooming parameter may affect an IP VPN service. Using Info Center, a network operator is able to quickly focus on service-affecting alarms and understand both the services and customers affected by the fault. Service providers can also use Info Center's information partitioning capabilities to make this information available to their customers via the Web as an added service dimension.Flexible Billing Solutions
The Cisco Service Management System also offers a suite of data collectors that aggregate, correlate and mediate data from Cisco's network elements and produce detailed usage records in standard record formats. Cisco is partnering with third-party billing system vendors to provide end-to-end solutions tailored to specific service provider market segments such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs). Service providers and Cisco billing system partners can rapidly integrate with CSM through open interfaces and well-defined record formats and access methods.Scalable Network and Element Management
Each Cisco Service Center solution integrates with a set of scalable, high-performance network and element managers to provide end-to-end configuration, monitoring and reporting support across the entire set of Cisco network elements. The Cisco WAN Manager provides network and element management support for Cisco's wide-area switches. The Cisco IP Manager provides fully scalable device support for the company's high-speed core and edge routers and other Cisco IOS.-based platforms. The Cisco Access Manager provides configuration, monitoring and advanced reporting for Cisco access solutions such as dial, xDSL and cable. This Web-based management system is designed for large, complex, distributed access environments and will facilitate optimum utilization of the Cisco access infrastructure.Common Foundation Services
The CSM architecture is consistent with the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) reference model developed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and endorsed by service providers worldwide. This model has been enhanced by Cisco to reflect the dynamic and flexible nature of today's multitechnology data networks and operational environments. CSM applications will share a common object model, topology and graphical user interface (GUI) in addition to services provided by Cisco Networking Services for Active Directory (CNS/AD).Extending the Value
Cisco is working with leading independent software vendors to provide additional applications on the CSM framework. Cisco has also partnered with leading integrators worldwide who will offer CSM integration, customization and deployment support for service providers.Availability
All product components of the Cisco Service Management System are in field trials today and will be available beginning in June 1998. Pricing is dependent upon network size, configuration and modules deployed.Cisco Systems
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