Zero Hour for Zero Touch
by Ouida Taaffe, ITU Telecom World 2003 On-Line News Service Staff
Intelliden touts holistic management of network devices
“The ability to automatically reconfigure will determine whether some telcos survive or not.”
Eoin McDonnell, BT Transform
IP networks are increasingly complicated creatures and to get them to function properly a lot of complicated provisioning is required. Unfortunately, tweaking the network manually is not only expensive, it’s likely to introduce undesired effects. Errors creep in and, if things get particularly knotty, no one will really know who did what to which box and when. Intelliden aims to overcome these issues.
“There is no unified control plane across heterogeneous devices, so you end up telenetting into all these different boxes, or you use 200 different element managers to deal with those boxes, which isn’t really efficient,” says Dale Hecht, CEO of Intelliden.
Intelliden has a software package that communicates with the network equipment, sitting above it quasi as an operating system does. Engineers then control the kit through the software layer without having to know the exact syntax and semantics of each particular unit in the network. It enables engineers to take the manual, error-prone processes out and do things that add value to the network, Hecht claims.
This is not the only bold claim that Intelliden makes. “We have really started a new category. We do a lot more than provisioning. It’s really about the holistic management of devices. No one else looks at the entire spectrum of things in the way that we do,” says Hecht.
This claim is enthusiastically backed up by Intelliden customer BT, which started researching Intelliden’s product 12 months ago and began integrating the solution into its stack in January. "We're one phase away from zero touch. Internally, we should have reached it by September this year. Without Intelliden, we wouldn't have a chance of doing it," says Eoin McDonnell, head of operational support systems for BT Transform.
"Why are there not many players in Intelliden's space? I think part of it is the sheer complexity. There were a few in 1998 and 1999, but they had single point solutions that did, say, only one of six things that were needed," adds McDonnell.
This lack of competition might worry some businesses. It is not generally an indication of strong market demand. However, Hecht is confident that the business is out there and his up-beat approach is supported by recent research from Yankee Group.
“As a market opportunity, it is substantial. CSPs worldwide spend more than $6 billion on provisioning processes, and an overwhelming majority of that amount is spent on custom solutions,” says the report. McDonnell is also convinced that what Intelliden is doing will be bought by telcos. “The ability to automatically reconfigure will determine whether some telcos survive or not. The days of 'here's your circuit' are gone. You must have flexibility. We have won new customers using the Intelliden software," says McDonnell.
The financial community is also suggesting that Intelliden may be on to something. Intelliden recently raised US$12.5 million from a consortium led by Westbury Partners. Other investors included 3i US, Matrix Partners and mortonsgroup LLC. Intelliden expects to reach free cash flow positive in “the very near future,” Hecht said and the company aims to have the lion’s share of its market--around 80 percent. The overall market opportunity in its niche is estimated at US$2 billion. There are no immediate plans for an IPO. However, Intelliden is structured to “be a large public company,” says Hecht.
Hecht hit on the idea behind Intelliden when he was working at MCI.
“It was clear to us several years ago building networks at MCI, as well as building networks for some of the largest customers, that the way we were doing business at that time wasn’t scalable for the future. What we did to scale networks was to throw more people at it. We threw more hardware at it. In the short term, that was OK, but as data continues to grow and the number of devices continues to grow, it is not tenable. Four to five years ago there were around 100 lines of CLI on a box. Now the average is in the 500 to 1000 range and some of our largest customers have in excess of 25,000 lines of configuration on their box. Trying to page through 25,000 lines of configuration physically becomes almost impossible,” says Hecht.
He also argues that the time pressure on engineers has increased dramatically. “You don’t have the luxury any more of making one change a week on Sunday between the hours of 2 and 4,” says Hecht. New applications are very dependent on the current state of the network, which demands that change be made continually.
Hecht also has clear ideas on why none of the big vendors have tackled the issues that he sees as key. “Box vendors have focused on speeds and feeds and features and less on the management of networks. None of those box vendors cares about the heterogeneous environment,” says Hecht. “Even if they did attack this, it would be for their own boxes and if you have a heterogeneous environment, you still have to swivel chair between the network management element systems or, especially, if you were going to write business applications through an API, you would have to write a separate interface to each of those element management systems which really kind of defeats the object.”
Ravi Pather, vice president of Intelliden EMEA, sees Intelliden as tackling the issues from a fresh perspective to that of the big vendors. “IBM, Cisco, etc., have elements of management software focused on productivity. For us, it is about more control and visibility of the network and the whole interaction of the business with the network--not about network productivity,” says Pather.
In terms of overall industry development, Hecht argues that IP networks are going through the sort of evolution processes already seen in mainframes and PCs. They started out with relatively rudimentary systems that were not very process-orientated and lacked real standards or structures. They reached a level of predictability, saw new mid-range applications added and then, when the decentralised model started to fail, processing control was brought in.
However, even if networks are becoming more sophisticated, some of the provisioning issues still being tackled by telcos are surprisingly far down the evolutionary ladder. "It sounds sad, but most people configuring a network still type commands onto each device by hand," says out McDonnell.
Hecht points out that, as things stand, almost all network knowledge is “carbon-based,” i.e., in the heads of the network engineers. It is, apparently, very rarely written down and documented, a rather intriguing approach that has obvious drawbacks, particularly if a key engineer decides to leave. “We have abstracted knowledge of the network from the devices themselves and captured it in the applications,” claims Hecht, thus avoiding much of the loss, confusion and omission that can result from the “carbon-based” approach.
Ouida Taaffe is an ITU Telecom World 2003 On-Line News Service editor.