Andrew Feinberg, president and CEO of OSS provider NetCraker Technology, uses the company’s recently expanded U.S. Army and Army National Guard contracts to highlight the industry trend toward IT and telecom network convergence and his company’s ability to facilitate it. NetCracker’s new 7.0 software release has been implemented by these branches of the military for inventory, reconciliation, workflow, and fulfillment capabilities in their IT and network environments, which extend to the field of combat. Feinberg spoke recently with Telephony Senior Editor Tim McElligott, a transcript of which follows:

At a high level, we talk a lot about transformation and what drives it. Basically, that’s fundamentally technology evolution. What we see more and more in a variety of carriers around the globe is the merging of two domains that have been traditionally very independent: the IT and network domains.

Traditionally, service providers ran in two massive silos, and they accounted for most of the capex and opex spending. And they did not communicate very well. Nor did they have a compelling reason to do so. But all of this has changed and continues to change when we get into next-generation services, when we get into content-based services, when we get into services that have now become critical to service provider competitiveness—and, I would argue, their survivability.

The traditional service provider service for many years has been access. Network people could always deliver access. But today, the question is: How do you deliver video or music or other services to an undisclosed or ever-changing location? This is no longer about access. These are services that are fulfilled and managed at the IT layer. So in order to deliver service that is meaningful and critical, we need to engage all the IT infrastructure as well as the network infrastructure and be able to holistically manage the service through the lifecycle to ensure a proper customer experience and fulfill our SLAs—and of course make money.

I would argue that a service provider really has to be able to manage third-party services the same way they manage their own. Just think of the layers of technology involved in delivering a triple-play service. Each component relies on different physical and logical resources, which can vary from copper wire to an email platform. In order to deliver, say, a Blackberry service, a service provider needs to be able to manage that service end-to-end. That doesn’t mean you only have to know what circuit you are riding but what platform and software you are using.

Take music downloads. Very popular. Big revenue generators. They are delivered over different types of networks—wireline, wireless, cable—but you hear all the time that the service provider has no way of knowing how a particular music download was fulfilled. So what do they do? They refund money without even knowing whether or not that download was successful. Think of that audience who downloads music. If there is a chance not to pay for something, they won’t.

So if a service provider has a fulfillment platform that crosses network and IT and is able to view that service delivery holistically, they can deliver those services more efficiently and know they were delivered. This is critical and will become more important as service providers migrate further up the value chain.

The Army relationship can be viewed as a hybrid of the service provider and enterprise. It would be among the top 10 service providers and top 10 enterprises. The Army National Guard has one of the largest networks in the world and operates truly globally.

They have physical needs in the areas of service fulfillment and service assurance.
When you think of a war unit being placed behind enemy lines, which happens all the time, that’s mission critical. You need to make sure all the connectivity and services are available to them. If they are putting a [soldier] in the desert, they need to make sure they have access to the network and all the intelligence and analytics they need to do their jobs. You can’t do that without both the network and IT.

We supply platforms that enable this to happen, much like we do in the service provider world. Even though the Army uses slightly different terminology, it is really service fulfillment and service assurance.

Obviously this is an extremely important and strategic project, but this is where the world is moving, and for service providers to be competitive, they have to understand how to manage this new and complex world of IT. Because we have been working with the Army for years in parallel to our work with service providers, we have always seen that IT and the network would eventually merge.

Historically, these domains have been separate. There are lots of technical challenges and just as many cultural challenges that need to be overcome.

The TeleManagement Forum is trying to play a central role as a standards body and enabler, and we are very involved. I think it is not without challenges, but we will get there. Propagating change is always challenging.