OES platform adapts well for utilities

Rolf Maste, System Product Manager, OSS Platforms, reports back from Management World, Nice on the success of OES' move into the world of energy providers and utilities.

At the recent Management World in Nice, Ireland's, ServusNet demonstrated its operations and maintenance management platform specifically designed to address the challenges posed for both wind farm owner/operators and the sector's outsourced managed services companies.

Their multi-technology and multi-vendor platform based on Nokia Siemens Networks OES allows the freedom to choose the best of breed technologies and change strategy. See last month's Middleware Newsletter. Its future looks good with large utilities that, by their nature, are bound to have complex and varied legacy issues.

ServusNet have proven how OES works outside the telco world with the platform they have built for wind farms. It was an eye-opener for many at Management World who had never thought of OES beyond the confines of the telecommunications industry and really brought home the fact that, with imagination and foresight, OES could bring big benefits to any industry where equipment needs to be remotely managed and integrated over a network.

'It's interesting the similarities you find between utilities and telco,' says Rolf Maste. 'Wind farms are something of an exception because they are a relatively new technology. The farms are only now being set up so there are fewer issues with legacy systems. But telco networks have grown piecemeal and every time something is added it needs to be integrated with service management, fault management and performance management systems. This is exactly the same problem faced by the growth seen in utilities.'

'Usually integrators don't have the luxury of starting from scratch so they are faced with network elements that have all been integrated in slightly different ways. No problem you might think? If they're all integrated why try to fix something that isn't broken? But one of the ways that this complexity burden becomes evident is in the way different kinds of equipment report alarms.'

'One of the reasons we chose Nokia Siemens Networks OES as the core of our platform was because of the functionality we could use to deal with the alarm correlation and filtering issues we were faced with' says Sean Condon, Product Development Manager at ServusNet. 'For network operators, dealing with the huge mass of alarms and error messages generated means it's often hard to see the wood for the trees. It's really difficult to define a clear picture from the raw data that's arriving. OES has alarm correlation down to a fine art, giving the operator a clear, unified view and hiding the complexity of repeated and extraneous information. If we'd had to build our own correlation and filtering system it would have taken up a lot of development time. OES almost gave us that functionality straight out of the box. It meant we could bring our platform to market in a very short timescale.'

In fact, using a very small development team, ServusNet had their first system on test with a customer just two months from starting the project.

'The fact that OES is built as a generic but flexible O&M platform that can be easily and quickly customized through the powerful instant adaptations was one of the key advantages that attracted us to it. It was important to us that the platform is not a telecoms platform, and we did not have to take any telecoms related functionality out. It was easy to add the wind related functionality in'

'The view of the alarms that you see and those that are hidden from you using OES is intuitive and powerful in terms of decision-making and the way that operators deal with issues on their networks' says Sean.

Rolf Maste is excited about the prospects for the future. 'ServusNet's development has proved that OES acts as a generic platform, it's potentially suitable for operations and maintenance in almost any industry. Such common management tools, working with differing technologies and multiple vendors provides common management processes, but with all the complexity hidden. ServusNet - by choosing Nokia Siemens Networks OES - have set the benchmark for others to break into other sectors and give operators, no matter which sector they are in, a consolidated view of their network management information.'