Cisco Provisioning Center and Cisco IP Manager Now Available for Cisco Service Management System
- More information on Cisco Provisioning Center
- More information on Cisco IP Manager
- More information on the Cisco Service Management System
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- January 18, 1999 -- Cisco Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced two new applications that allow service providers to automate provisioning and rapidly deploy new services to customers. Cisco Provisioning Center and Cisco IP Manager are available now as components of the Cisco Service Management System.
The Cisco Service Management System (CSM) is a comprehensive suite of network and service management applications that allow service providers to plan, provision, monitor and bill value-added for differentiated services. CSM applications are specifically designed to meet the reliability, scalability and performance requirements demanded by service providers.
"Cisco continues to deliver products and services that allow service providers to offer new, value-added services, deploy them quickly and automate their processes," said Herb Madan, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Network and Service Management Business Unit. "Cisco Provisioning Center and Cisco IP Manager are two important products that will help service providers meet the scale, performance and reliability requirements demanded by their customers."
Cisco Provisioning Center
Cisco Provisioning Center (CPC) is an integrated, automated provisioning solution for network service providers who offer Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and quality-of-service (QoS) based network services. By automating the provisioning process, CPC reduces the complexity and expense associated with today's manually configured services while reducing costs and improving time to market. Higher quality service deployment through automation also improves service quality over error-prone, manual deployment methods. Designed with service providers in mind, CPC scales to support millions of network objects and dozens of flow-through sessions saving service providers additional expenses.CPC provides comprehensive cross-platform provisioning. The CPC provisioning engine communicates with network elements via generic interfaces to Cisco element managers such as Cisco WAN Manager (CWM). Additionally, through Cisco's relationship with Syndesis, Ltd., the CPC architecture supports element managers from third party vendors, providing an integrated, multi-vendor solution for service providers.
"The ability to automatically provision Cisco equipment in U S WEST's core network is a key component of our Umbrella Management System," said Fritz Hendricks, director of Infrastructure Planning and Support at U S WEST. "Our Umbrella Management System enables us to reduce costs, increase speed-to-market and improve quality of deployment of new customer services such as Megabit."
The flow-through application programming interfaces (APIs) embedded in CPC allow integration with existing Operations Support Systems (OSS) and network management systems. This integration enables service providers to facilitate order management, billing and capacity planning for reduced time-to-market and cost of service. With CPC, service providers can start by building an abstract model of new services, and later refine the service model to take advantage of device specific features.
Cisco IP Manager
Cisco IP Manager is a scalable, device-oriented provisioning system for Cisco IOS. software-based network services. This system uses templates and sub-templates to generate Cisco IOS software configurations. To ensure high-quality configuration deployment, Cisco IP Manager provides syntax and integrity functions to validate configuration files before they are deployed on the network. Cisco IP Manager is designed to integrate with an existing OSS to deliver bulk configuration changes to the network. Cisco IP Manager ensures rapid, error-free deployment of customer premise equipment (CPE) by allowing service providers to automate the device provisioning and validation function."As AT&T's Internet business continues to grow rapidly, the number and complexity of configuration files that needed to be loaded onto routers was also growing, said John Mulligan, district manager of AT&T Worldnet's Business IP Systems Engineering. "Existing semi-manual processes would not scale to meet this demand. By integrating the Cisco IP Manager product into our core provisioning systems, we will be able to achieve flow-through provisioning. With this, we expect to be able to reduce our unit costs, improve provisioning intervals and improve security."
As part of CSM, Cisco IP Manager can integrate with other tools in the system to enable customer-focused service management. Cisco IP Manager offers a rich set of APIs to integrate with other management tools such as CPC and existing OSSs for automated provisioning of network services.
Pricing and Availability
Both products are available today. Cisco Provisioning Center pricing starts at $300,000, and the Cisco IP Manager base package price is $75,000.Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is theworldwide leader in networking for the Internet.Cisco, Cisco IOS, Cisco Systems and the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
