Cisco Service Management system delivers comprehensive management solution

Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, announced the first components of the Cisco Service Management System, a comprehensive suite of network and service management applications that allow service providers to plan, provision, monitor and bill for differentiated services. The Cisco Service Management (CSM) applications are specifically designed to meet the reliability, scalability and performance requirements demanded by service providers to meet growing customer expectations. CSM components, available now, are Cisco Info Center (CIC), Cisco Access Manager (CAM) and Cisco WAN Manager (CWM).

"Cisco is continuing to deliver products and services that allow service providers to offer new, value-added services, deploy them quickly and automate their processes wherever possible," says Garth Braithwaite, Head of Service Provider Line of Business, Cisco Systems SA. "The Cisco Service Management System enables service providers to meet these requirements while at the same time scaling the performance and reliability of their network infrastructure to meet the increasing expectations of their customers."

Profitable Service Operations

Cisco Info Center (CIC) is a real-time, high-performance service-level monitoring and diagnostic tool that simplifies centralized fault and alarm management by providing a consolidated view of events in multitechnology and multivendor networks. Designed to help network operators focus on critical network events, CIC offers easy-to-use tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform functions such as event filtering, alarm correlation, rule definitions and flexible network alarm viewing and partitioning.

Element and Network Management

Cisco Access Manager is a targeted network access management solution built specifically to manage high-density, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and modem access solutions. This Web-based management system is designed for large, complex, distributed access environments and facilitates service deployment and operation through configuration, monitoring and reporting features. Cisco Access Manager also allows the service provider to optimise WAN links, reducing overall WAN costs and optimizes WAN bandwidth for network traffic.

CAM`s configuration, monitoring and historical report generation features help service providers quickly deploy, expand and troubleshoot dial access networks while minimizing operational costs and maximizing the availability of remote access systems. Other components of CAM such as Cisco IOS Manager, Modem Firmware Manager and Configuration File Manager, allow network operators to schedule image download and manipulate configuration changes for maintenance purposes.

The third component, Cisco WAN Manager, formerly known as StrataView Plus, is a comprehensive network and element management system that enables operations, maintenance and management of WAN multiservice networks. CWM has a robust, scalable architecture that meets the demands of end-to-end, Layer2 configuration, fault and performance management and operations. This application supports small networks with a few hundred virtual connections, as well as large, service provider backbones with hundreds of thousands of virtual connections.

CSM applications can be deployed together to support integrated Layer2/Layer3 (multitechnology) solutions like quality-of-service (QoS), virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet telephony, or in a modular fashion to support service offerings like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Frame Relay. Each CSM application has a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate service automation and enable it to be easily integrated into existing operations support systems (OSSs) or augmented by third-party solutions.