European telecom operators risk being sidelined in the global cloud computing market as aggressive North American and Asian operators spend billions to build international presence. New research from Informa’s Telecom Cloud Monitor has found that European operators accounted for only 7% of the US$13.5 billion that operators committed on cloud assets in 2011. North American and Asian operators accounted for 90%, or US$12 billion. [Read more…]

Amartus, a developer of next generation OSS/BSS solutions, has launched Service Commander, the industry’s first end-to-end next-generation connectivity service automation management platform, enabling service providers to automate their connectivity service delivery process.

The rapid proliferation of next-generation connectivity services required for cloud transport, wireless backhaul, residential and business services has placed increased pressure on carriers to deliver services more rapidly and cost-effectively than ever before. This is a sea change for service providers and Service Commander is the first solution available to automate the design, deployment and operation of those services.

“New connectivity services used to take years to deploy since the service was intrinsically bound up with the particular network equipment deployed. The new, more flexible, connectivity service layer being deployed with modern Ethernet and IP/MPLS equipment can radically decrease that time,” said Mark H. Mortensen, Principal Analyst with Analysys Mason. “But to realize that potential, an operator must deploy modern service-focused management systems to automate the delivery and management of service level connectivity.”

Service Commander has been designed from the ground up to address next-generation connectivity service delivery needs, which include delivery of richer services in compressed time frames with reduced operational costs. Legacy OSS’s are element & network centric and incapable of meeting these requirements.

Service Commander bridges the gap between traditional network and element management solutions and OSS’s need to automate the delivery of customer facing services (CFSs). Service Commander separates the service design phase from the provisioning and operation of services and provides tools specifically built to support the complex mapping between the service and network/element layer which typically involves 100’s of attributes and operations and is highly error prone.

“Over the years, we’ve worked closely with Amartus because of the extensive and unique expertise they bring to our IxRave NGN and services monitoring solution,” said Walker Colston, VP of Converged Monitoring at Ixia. “Solutions such as Service Commander will play a key role for carriers in accelerating the successful deployment of new, high-value services through improved integration and automation.”

Service Commander is built upon Chameleon OS™, Amartus’ next-generation carrier grade management platform designed to support a range of NGN OSS and management solutions including service managers, network managers, element managers, test managers, OSS/BSS gateways, customer self-service portals, and more. Chameleon OS also provides an abstraction layer, which is key to integrating NGN services onto existing OSS environments.

“Our extensive experience in working directly with network equipment vendors and service providers, as well as active standards body participation has uniquely qualified us to build a solution like Service Commander,” said Michael Kearns, CEO of Amartus. “We are pleased to have this opportunity to participate in the transformation from a silo-based to a service-based management world.”

Key features of the software include:

• Complete service lifecycle management including service design, inventory, discovery, provisioning and assurance
• Multi-service, multi-technology platform
• Support for MEF Carrier Ethernet
• Extensible to support other NG services IP/MPLS and OTN
• Standards-based OSS model (TMF)
Model driven, open and modular architecture
Rapid customization and integration support
• Standalone and OSS integration deployment
• Carrier-grade reliability, scalability & performance

Availability

Service Commander is available now.

About Amartus

Founded in 2003, Amartus develops next generation OSS/BSS and network management solutions for service providers. The company’s flagship product, Service Commander™ is a connectivity service automation management system that integrates existing OSS and network management systems to provide comprehensive end-to-end management for NGN services. Amartus is an active member of leading standards organizations including the TeleManagement Forum (TMN) and Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).

The company is privately-held and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with offices in the U.S. and Poland. More information is at www.amartus.com.