Network Management in the Service Provider World

CaaS / SaaS Featured Article

April 15, 2009

By Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communications Group

IBBS (Integrated BroadBand Services) is a leading provider of triple play software and services to broadband network operators, particularly MSOs (cable companies).

Dave Keil, CEO of IBBS, says that his company provides three things to its 220 or so Tier-2 MSO customers, which are primarily in North America, with a few in Latin America.

First, the company has a proprietary software solution called BBX, which provides provisioning capabilities as well as some very sophisticated diagnostics for cable operators. Second, Keil says, couple that software with services that allow iBBS to outsource a significant amount of its customers’ operations, technology and customer support infrastructure.

“Our services include a robust 24x7 NOC as well as very significant technical support group. It also involves advanced services and sophisticated engineers,” he said. “So, those services are a very important part of what we offer to complement our software.”

And third, the company also takes on some of its customers’ other applications, such as e-mail and some Web portals.

“I guess what’s really important to emphasize is that we integrate all of this together — the software, the services and the applications — into one very tightly coupled package. Our integration capabilities are especially important because we’re able to integrate not only what we provide but also the other aspects of a customer’s ecosystem, such as their billing capabilities and their VoIP infrastructure, into what we deliver. Therefore, our customers really rely on us to take on a significant part of their operation and assist them in a very significant way.”

“From a market standpoint, we are focused on that Tier-2 space,” says Keil. “There are over 1,000 cable operators in North America that we would categorize as Tier-2, which service about 5 million high-speed data subscribers. We’ve got about 700,000 of those, so we’ve got about 14 or 15 percent of the U.S. market. We’re moving into Latin America, which is another significant market for us. We have a few small customers there, but we recently signed on with an important distributor there, Power and Tel, and we believe their local presence will be very important in helping us improve our distribution down in those countries.

“We’re also taking the company into several areas. We’re adding additional products – last year we added a great deal of capabilities onto our VoIP software products that complement our base data products that historically have been our strength. This year we’re adding video capabilities to round out our triple play offerings and we’re also adding some significant capabilities around bandwidth management this year. Finally, in the second half of 2009, we intend to offer our customers some capabilities relating to commercial services. And in October 2008 we completed an important acquisition of our competitor Parasun Technologies, a provider of broadband provisioning, management and support solutions, which we obtained from Canada-based Uniserve Communications.”

“As for network management, if you think of the kind of service and infrastructure that a large Tier-1 would offer, that’s exactly what our Tier-2 customers are attempting to recreate through an outsource model, leveraging iBBS,” says Keil.

Chris Anderson, Vice President of Product Development and Management at iBBS, says, “A common theme that we come across is the ‘reduction of the swivel chair’ through all of the different applications that these companies provide. Part of what we’re doing is to build a much more open architecture based on an SOA [Service Oriented Architecture]-level technology that will allow us to integrate all of these technologies together, and it is in our roadmap that before the end of 2009 we will be able to do the flow-through provisioning from the key billing systems such as GLDS [Great Lakes Data Systems, which provides Windows-based billing, subscriber management, and provisioning solutions], and so forth, that will enable MSOs to provision across the triple play to that product, so the data will flow through to us and we will be able to provide back to them either provisioning or provisioning and diagnostics on all of the areas of their business. That’s a key element of what we’re trying to achieve in the short-term.”

Adds Anderson, “In the longer term, we have two major areas of focus we are attempting to address. One is to complete our moving to handle triple play. We won’t do video provisioning, since there’s already a lot of that technology already available through the billings companies, we do intend to add video diagnostics this year so that we can complete all of that information through either the MSOs’ billing companies, or through ourselves. Our second major area of interest is on bandwidth management. We’re certainly very keen. We’ve been watching the recent ruling from the FCC in terms of Comcast, and we’re certainly proponents of allowing acceptable use policies, so the MSOs will be able to publish limits on the data consumptions for the customers on what we will be able to do is either to re-provision the customer’s service to reduce that to meet those levels, or else we will be able to allow that to continue to flow and be able to integrate onward billing of overages back to the billing companies.”

“We hold a lot of network information,” says Anderson, “because obviously we’re not just monitoring the individual devices in the end subscribers homes, but we’re also managing the MSO’s infrastructure itself. So, one of the things we can do – and hold the interesting information for — is that we can look at some of the network ‘pinchpoints’ and get a better appreciation of some of the quality of the VoIP calls and things like that which are traversing those customers’ networks. We can see some of the capacity and other constraints. It all allows us to provide much more of a ‘holistic’ service to the MSOs, rather than just provide a very narrow channel of information. Our intention is really to provide a much more outsourced operational and strategic as well as tactical view for the MSOs.”

“Essentially we offer a centralized application, but we also have numerous services which hang off that, such as our call center, and our NOC, all of which run integrated applications that link into the central suite of products that we build,” says Anderson. “That’s key for us – our centralized suite of products which can intercommunicate, so we can see things at a high detailed level, but also at a holistic level, too.”

The original article can be read online at TMCnet Internet Telephony Magazine, along with parts one and two of the series.