Parallon March 2010 Newsletter

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http://www.parallon.com/news/parallon2010newsletter.pdf

Dilbert on CMMI

eTOM and ITIL

It's interesting how two worlds co-existed in the large Telco environments but did not have much interaction... I am talking about IT and Telecom, even from the consulting point of view, we would only deal with IT but never touch the telecom management areas and each side had something tha the other side needed. Lately we see more interaction between the two areas and it is interesting how more advanced IT was in the service support areas with ITIL. Service Desk software are badly needed in the telecom side of the large companies and now ITIL is officially part of eTOM v8, addressing the service support areas. eTOM addresses the entire Telecom enterprise, however, it is remains higher level than ITIL in terms of detail. On the other hand, it gives a good of the Telecom company structure. In smaller telecom companies (and also younger companies) we have done for example provisioning control through service desk in the past and the telecom guys were able to keep the provisioning side organized and simplified processes and their life in general... however, looking at large telecoms, some of them struggle to keep track of the situation with little homegrown applications left and right but given the increase of demand for data networks and managed services now the situation gets more serious and is a critical revenue channel that needs to be optimized.
Shown below are the areas that ITIL v3 addresses (click on the image to enlarge):

Having said that though, people have to realize that they need to share information, centralize the information and manage the processes end-to-end in the Telecom company, and that is where the CTO and CIO roles are very critical in getting this through, especially in ex state owned telecoms where there was a big gap between upper and middle management.
HP is ahead of the competition and has developed ISM, a framework that combines eTOM and ITIL and uses the BTO software in combination with the traditional HP Telecom Management software (e.g. Temip) to address that space, as shown below:


The core of the solution is Service Manager along with the uCMDB for service support and the Parallon SLA Bus has evolved as an enterprise Telecom SLM solution and goes hand-in-hand with the HP BTO products in the complete SLM solution.








The Parallon SLA Bus is integrated with HP Operations Manager, Service Manager and uCMDB to manage complex Telecom SLAs. A couple of screen shots below of the SLA Bus v3.0 coming out in February:

Further reading for eTOM and ITIL:

Paper “TR-143 Building Bridges: ITIL and eTOM by TMForum”, the ITIL incident management processes are part of eTOM framework and the adaptation of these processes is NGOSS compliant.

Also, another reference paper that also includes the configuration management part is

“GB921V: Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), The Business Process Framework, Release 6.0”

Both papers above are available through TMFORUM.

Burj Dubai Tower

Burj Dubai was inaugurated today, that is the tallest building in the world at 828 meter with 168 floors. Some Parallon consultants have witnessed the rising of Burj Dubai since 2006 when we started the upgrade of Etisalat's NMS systems and today we have witnessed it's completion as we are delivering one of the largest ITSM projects in the MEMA region, the Etisalat SLM solution.
It was sad to see how the news about Dubai were misrepresented in the world media during the last month. A company asking to freeze it's debt payments for six months was interpreted that Dubai is going down and it's the end of it... Dubai went through the hard times exactly a year ago and now it is on it's way to recover. Yes, it will take a while before it comes back to the high growth it had two years ago but the important thing is that it is on it's way up. Burj Dubai was renamed Burj Khalifa in honor of the UAE President and ruler of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Khalifa.

Youli Bogdanou joined Parallon

Youli Bogdanou has joined the Parallon team as a software developer working on the development and support of Parallon SLA Logic Bus and the Paralert products.

Dubai coming back!!! Abu Dhabi taking off...

A year ago Dubai was highly affected by the economic crisis and some journalists jumped to the opportunity of exaggerating the situation. However, I am glad to say that Dubai economy is coming back. People start pouring in (and traffic is bad again..) but this is a good sign. Roads and malls are packed and Dubai is growing again at fast pace and feels great being in this vibrant city. Our business is growing fast in the UAE given the needs of companies that are growing and all the effort we have put in the past years to break into the Middle East market are now paying off.


Abu Dhabi has been developing like crazy the past few years. It feels like Dubai around 2003 and it feels like it has been taxiing in the past years and just took off. The Formula 1 race few weeks ago was the lift off sign from Abu Dhabi. The Ferrari theme park is almost ready and I personally enjoy driving the new highway through Yas Island that takes you through beautiful scenery of Sadiyat Island and gets you straight to the Corniche of Abu Dhabi. The UAE is truly the center of the Middle East region and the place that bridges East and West.

Speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd

A speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd at Berkeley's Haas Business School. We are grateful to Mark for turning around HP and bringing it's partner closer to HP.