By Ravi Ravishankar

A good customized Network Management system can be the difference between making or losing a sale in the highly competitive telecom/datacom equipment industry. This is a key reason that the big equipment vendors have their own EMS/NMS applications. They have been at this for a long time and have products in the market that are fairly good at providing the required FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security) functionality to support their equipment.  

On the other hand it is the medium to small sized vendors who are in a bind as to whether to develop their own EMS/NMS applications from scratch, use 3r party applications or have them built by someone else. Regardless of how this finally gets done, the end product should be something that can be used as the differentiator against the competition.  

There are different architectures and technologies that can be used to build the product but the bottom line is the impression it makes on the prospective customer that finally matters. This impression is created by many factors, not the least of which is the look and feel and the ease of use of the application.

For many of the small to medium sized equipment vendors, a good EMS/NMS solution is an afterthought.  Additionally, a good number of these vendors do not have the domain expertise in this space. Trying to decide how to build it right can result in a loss of time and money – something that seems to happen fairly often in the telecom industry.  A fair bit of the time is wasted due to requirement churn and user interface changes. Therefore it is safe to say that starting the effort with good prior knowledge is a key to building a successful Network Management application.

A good EMS/NMS application should have solid coverage of the FCAPS functionality customized for the network that is to be managed. Respecting your time today, on my next post I will discuss what I feel are some of the important GUI features to consider when implementing a Network Management application for managing telecom/datacom equipment, with emphasis on network topology display. In the meantime if you want to weigh in with your own experiences on developing EMS/NMS applications please leave a comment and let’s continue the dialog.

(Ravi Ravishankar is a Senior Software Engineer at MapleWorks Technology Inc., the smart choice for onshore software development for networking and telecom companies.)