NetNumen™ UNMS Undertaking Hard Jobs of Managed Services

The increasing complexity of telecom networks has imposed the requirements for more flexible network Operation & Maintenance (O&M). Telecom operators are seeking to handover their private networks to equipment suppliers for maintenance so that they can focus on providing more valuable services to subscribers to maximize the expected profits in the era of competition, which gives rise to the concept of managed services. To provide reliable and persistent managed services, the equipment suppliers should be clear about the challenges for network O&M, as shown in Figure 1.

Conventionally, various Element Management Systems (EMSs) are installed to manage and maintain their proprietary technology networks. As a result, these proprietary EMSs have the following obvious drawbacks such as lack of interoperability between EMSs, proprietary GUI style, inconsistency in management data, difficulties in report creations, lack of uniform maintenance flow, and lack of uniform asset management tool. The purpose of managed services is to reduce cost and improve QoS. As the traditional way of distributed network O&M fails to meet the target, the managed services supplier must move from distributed O&M to centralized O&M. 

ZTE has rolled out its NetNumen™ Unified Network Management System (UNMS) that features centralized supervision, centralized maintenance and centralized management. The NetNumen™ UNMS has a use case in ZTE’s National Network Operations Centre (NNOC) in India and it is now providing top-quality managed services in combination with the Electronic Operation and Maintenance System (EOMS) for Indian telecom operators. 

Benefits for Managed Services 

The NetNumen™ UNMS has the following benefits for telecom managed services: 

Centralized O&M

The NetNumen™ UNMS can implement centralized management of multiple EMSs, allowing operators to get the unified statistics about operation condition of the entire network. By analyzing the relationship among EMSs, it correlates alarms from multiple EMSs so that the maintenance personnel can quickly locate and troubleshoot a root failure. Additionally, the EMSs utilize integrated network information resources and operate in coordination with one another to avoid blindness and improve O&M efficiency. 

Dynamic integration with EOMS 

The NetNumen™ UNMS generates a work order for critical alarms and associates it automatically to the trouble ticket system, and then the work order is issued and processed. In this way, the self-organized EOMS is established. The fixation of alarm processing flows in the EOMS accelerates the speed of fault handling, improves efficiency of O&M personnel, and facilitates overall management of service quality as well. 

Integration with asset management system

In combination with the Asset Management System (AMS), the NetNumen™ UNMS provides centralized management of network assets. Knowing information about the network assets at any moment, operators can have appropriate spare parts configured and improve the asset utilization. 

Favorable expandability

The NetNumen™ UNMS incorporates favorable extensibility that allows ZTE’s NNOC to bring in networks of many telecom operators under its control and provide managed services for them by raising further system integration and manpower utilization. 

Application for ZTE’s NNOC in India

More and more operators are putting the definite requirements to equipment suppliers for providing a centralized network management system to reduce their network management overhead. Therefore, ZTE’s consideration to develop a unified management system occupies this capability to transform the operators’ requirement in an implementation form. The NetNumen™ UNMS has got a great popularity in many managed services projects. 

Because of its large land area and widely dispersed population centers, India has a big telecommunication network. Many Indian operators have a strong requirement for managing and maintaining their entire networks at a single place in a centralized manner. For this reason, ZTE has constructed its managed services center in India (NNOC) that can provide a unified management platform for operators in India with the aim of reducing their total cost of operations and reducing their maintenance costs by eliminating unwanted operations. Figure 2 shows the architecture of ZTE’s NNOC in India. 

ZTE’s NetNumen™ UNMS is used to implement centralized fault management and centralized performance management. The blue “A” in Figure 2 indicates an access adapter, through which the NetNumen™ UNMS gets alarm and performance data from its subordinate EMSs. Based on the data from each EMS, the NetNumen™ UNMS provides each operator with a complete alarm and performance analysis on its various private networks. The distributed heterogeneous network management finally becomes homogenous management.

The NetNumen™ UNMS submits the processed alarm data to the EOMS through the gateway. The trouble ticket subsystem of the EOMS then coordinates with all the relevant departments for electronic failure handling. Thus the failure handling is controlled in a closed-loop fashion. 

The AMS is a data center containing all static network resources and other inventory resource information. Through the specific interface, external systems get their needed data conveniently. This centralized management of network resources helps to increase utilization of network resources. 

The UNMS, EOMS and AMS all have their own report management modules that can provide each operator with a complete alarm and performance management report, work order handling report, and asset usage report of its various private networks. The maintenance staff can have a full knowledge about the operation condition of all private networks and report to the operators about their own network O&M and Service Level Agreement (SLA) satisfaction. 

The NetNumen™ UNMS for ZTE’s NNOC in India implements centralized management of many private networks from different operators. Network failures can be located quickly and precisely through correlation analysis; the maintenance staff only need to check the operator interface on the UNMS; EMSs can be left unattended and maintained in an automatic fashion without the operator involvement. Therefore, the valuable expert resources can be shared and the cost of manpower can be cut greatly.     

Conclusion

In order to fulfill the operators’ growing demands for centralized network management, ZTE has launched its NetNumen™ UNMS solution that can help them raise network O&M efficiency, lower the OPEX, reduce customer complaints and effectively improve their quality of services. With good extensibility, adaptation to the network development, and guarantee for sustainable operations support, the NetNumen™ UNMS has enhanced ZTE’s capability to deliver better managed services to operators worldwide.