Download Service Management System Solution sheet

Interview with Oren Feld - Marketing Product Manager

Q. Telco Systems has recently announced a service management system called EdgeGenie.  Other vendors have also made investments in the management and provisioning of their carrier Ethernet and edge routers to ease the complexity and cost of provisioning, monitoring, and delivering Ethernet services.  How does service management differ from element and network management?

A. Element and network management looks at the individual element level and connectivity between elements. It provides element configuration and monitoring capabilities, link status monitoring transport status monitoring, etc.  Service management, on the other hand, enables configuration and monitoring of end-to-end services across the network.  For us, service management needed to be a simple, intuitive operation that saved the operator time and expense, yet provided the ability to assure the service across multiple domains and technologies.

Q. Provisioning services at the edge of the network is a huge task.  How does EdgeGenie simplify this process?

A. EdgeGenie’s state-of-the-art, intuitive GUI enables personnel to define a service, a transport type, SLA profiles, design sophisticated service paths, and utilize protection schemes with a simple point-and-click operation.  This eliminates the need for complex CLI scripts which often result in service delays, service mistakes, and ultimately unhappy customers.

Q. Network failures can sometimes be hard to pinpoint.  What mechanism does EdgeGenie use to ensure that these failures are caught and corrected quickly?

A. We provide root-cause analysis and correlation to services on top of fault management. This is a huge advantage. Instead of struggling with hundreds of alarms and trying to figure out where the problem originated, we analyze it automatically and provide a summarized view of the root causes in the network. The root-cause analysis engine also provides a view of the affected services from network faults. This way the NOC operator can quickly understand which network faults affect services and attend to the relevant faults.

Q. How do you manage the power users who may account for more bandwidth than the infrastructure can support?

A. Our resource management module allows the operator to pinpoint the heavily utilized links, ports and network elements. In this way he can understand exactly where the bottlenecks in his network are and where to upgrade, or how to better distribute traffic across the network without investing additional capital.

Q. Does EdgeGenie only support Telco System’s equipment?

A. Initially, EdgeGenie will allow operators to use its intuitive GUI to create models of 3rd party network equipment vendors’ equipment and intersperse them in EdgeGenie’s network topology and inventory. This way, the operator can get a visualization of his entire network end-to-end. In addition, the service analyzer will visualize the service path including the 3rd party unmanaged devices. The operator can use that information to manually configure the portion of the service that runs through the 3rd party equipment.

Q. When will EdgeGenie be available for general distribution?

A. We are currently in trials with several customers.  We expect that it will be generally available in January, 2011.