At Fujitsu Network Communications, Holly Rosenbower, Marketing Director of the NETSMART Product Line, says that her company’s customers are trying to integrate their current legacy equipment, such as Sonet/SDH equipment, with some of the newer technologies out there such as DWDM transport.

 

Rosenbower says she not only helps sales with the NETSMART 1500 element management application butworks with them on getting the right parts and hardware that’s necessary to run, and more on the operations side, once the software application is up and running, into the customer environment.

 

“Lately the customers have been looking at some cost-effective methods to deploy, manage and maintain these new technologies and services in and over the network,” she told TMCnet in an interview. “They need something that requires a short time to learn and can integrate easily into their current operations. We provide the NETSMART 1500 as a single management system that supports all of the Fujitsu network elements.”

 

So as Fujitsu’s customers deploy a new technology such as packet optical transport, they don’t have to go back and re-learn a new software application, she said.

 

“Everything is already integrated within our current application. It’s integrated within our current GUI. Sometimes customers are concerned and they say, ‘Oh, you’re introducing something new, now what else will I have to learn? New training operations?’ With our environment, however, there’s peace of mind that our application brings in and it supports that within the current framework and structure that they know.”

 

“Also, some of our network operator customers want to manage things on their own,” says Rosenbower. “They want to have the software application in-house. They want to deploy the server. But perhaps there are some smaller customers and they might not have the head count, resources or capex to order an additional server that’s required to run things. So Fujitsu now offers a NETSMART 1500 hosted EMS [Element Management System], where we will actually do all of the maintenance for the customer on their server and yet they maintain control over the NETSMART 1500 application. They can do all of the provisioning and monitoring, all within the organization.

 

“The application is hosted on our Fujitsu server in our NOC (News - Alert) [Network Operations Center], and that saves the customer money, especially customers having smaller network deployments. It saves them server hardware costs. They also don’t have to worry about maintaining the server, or upgrading memory or hardware if the requirements of a new software release call for it. So, you don’t need a Server Admin with Solaris, Unix or other server administration knowledge. We offer than all in-house. That’s very enticing to our customers that are looking to save money because the head count is tight right now.”

 

“Another NETSMART 1500 option relates to a customer who wants to deploy a server within a particular data center,” says Rosenbower. “We have feature called network partitioning. Basically, instead of deploying a server at each site, we deploy one at a central location such as a data center and then from there each site can access their own view within their network. That’s also a cost savings to our customers who don’t want to deploy a server at each site.”

 

“Customers also want to know what other groups in their company can utilize such software, because it is an investment,” says Rosenbower. “Traditionally, the NETSMART 1500 software runs in the NOC, but carriers and our other customers invest in this software, we want to be able to show them that not only the network operator can utilize the software but there are other groups within the company that can use it. We have a new feature in our latest release of NETSMART 1500: bandwidth management.

 

“That feature is basically a web-based reporting tool that can be accessed from anyone just typing in a particular URL. You don’t have to have the software actually installed on your machine that you can just use a URL to see a bandwidth utilization report. It’s good for people in the network planning and engineering department. It can go out and looks at what’s currently being used in the network, what ports are available, how much STS bandwidth do I have available on this particular card and then they can go and effectively plan what type of equipment and inventory needs they may need to have as they move forward in the growth of their network.”