Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 9- Craig Clausen and Dick Tomlinson

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 9

	This Month's Issue:
	Delivering the Total Package

"Live" and Adaptive Inventory

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Such exact resource management requires inventory tracking that is as close to real-time as possible. Unfortunately, most existing inventory systems can’t provide the telecom equivalent of Wal-Mart’s point-of-sale precision.

WHY NOT TRADITIONAL INVENTORY?
Service providers are learning the hard way that inventory management systems designed for yesterday’s services are not up to the task of rapidly delivering to market advanced services such as IPTV and Triple Play. And it’s no wonder. Current inventory systems were developed to treat services purely as connectivity. So while these typically “off-line” systems are capable of managing traditional services and the physical network build-outs

Service providers are learning the hard way that inventory management systems designed for yesterday’s services are not up to the task of rapidly delivering to market advanced services such as IPTV and Triple Play.

Support communication-intensive applications that require end-to-end networking resources;
Perform resource reservation and resource adaptation in convergent, multi-bearer communications environments, ensuring service quality levels for dynamic offerings; $ Coordinate adaptation between the different layers of the network in order to solve the

required to support new customer, they lack the native continuous discovery and the productized IP and application intelligence necessary to easily support services that extend up the network and provisioning stacks. They can’t maintain the accurate “service-to-network” pictures that are key to managing dynamic services and the shared resources that support them. And they’re not able to keep pace with the volumes, rate of change, and constant interactions of the application age.

Expanding the scope of some existing systems through extensive coding is certainly possible in theory, but stretching traditional inventory systems for higher-level services or new technologies does not usually work in practice. Such projects ultimately slow new service introduction and revenues. And lengthy, over-budget, or altogether failed projects are all too common.

Consider, for example, an IPTV deployment that offers extensive end user self-service capabilities. Suppose a user decides to order a new HDTV channel for their service. Because the IP network and the network layers below it are shared resources, the new, bandwidth-hungry, high definition channel may create contention with other traffic, such as the neighbor’s VoIP service. In this way, the configuration of the new service’s connectivity becomes inseparable from the QoS requirements of the application, such as latency and jitter parameters. This orchestration must happen seamlessly and automatically in a self-service environment.

With the detailed and continually up-to-date visibility that adaptive resource management provides – from connectivity to content

– CSPs can realize such seamless orchestration. And in general, they can more efficiently and effectively:

problems introduced by scarce, dynamic and/or shared network resources, providing just enough shared resources –both application and infrastructure – required for a particular service, based on demand; and

- Make continually accurate network and service data and its benefits available to the entire OSS/BSS and broader supply chain.

BUT AMERICAN FLAGS AREN’T NEXT-GEN SERVICES
While CSPs can certainly learn a good deal about lean operations and live inventory from Wal-Mart, the American flag legend only gets us so far.

Wal-Mart’s customer’s, after all, are not likely to request customized American flags to meet their specific needs, demanding more stripes for certain occasions and applications, more stars for another. When it comes to American flags, one style fits all, and one size fits most.

Not so for new application-based services.

Which is why adopting a more precise and adaptive approach to inventory management is so important to the future of communications service delivery and management. The very nature of advanced application-based services – real-time, multi-media, interactive, bundled, personalized, resource-sharing and continually changing – demands a degree of visibility and responsiveness traditional inventory systems just can’t provide.

But solutions based on the principles of “live” and adaptive resource management can. With them, CSPs can take inventory management to the next level, accurately, efficiently and profitably matching network and application resources to often very individual needs of next-generation services and the subscribers who receive them.

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