Advanced Process-Based Component Integration in Telcordia's Cable OSS

Operation Support Systems (OSSs) integrate software components and network elements to automate the provisioning and monitoring of telecommunications services. This demonstration illustrates Telcordia’s Cable OSS, and shows how customers may use this OSS to provision IP and telephone services over the cable infrastructure. Telcordia’s Cable OSSs is a process-based application, i.e., a collection of flows, and specialized components (e.g., a billing system, a Call Agent soft switch, network services and elements, cable modems, etc.) and corresponding adaptors that are integrated, coordinated, and monitored using CMI, Telcordia’s advanced process-based integration technology. Customers interact with the Cable OSS by using web or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) interfaces. The Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) is an advanced technology for supporting the integration of applications/components and the coordination of humans and applications possibly working in different enterprises. CMI combines the capabilities that until now were provided by separate technologies such as production workflow, groupware, and object-based middleware. In addition to combining these technologies, CMI provides many novel primitives and corresponding system functionalities supporting: coordination flexibility, process extensibility and synchrony, awareness provisioning, and advanced processbased application integration. In ICDE2000, we demonstrated a CMI-based solution for medical crisis mitigation that illustrated CMI’s flexible coordination and awareness capabilities. In the current demo, we focus on CMI’s advanced system integration and conversational coordination capabilities that have been utilized in the development of Telcordia’s Cable OSS.