Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks will develop a standards-based telecommunications network management platform that will help service providers manage the increasing complexity of their networks and speed time to market of new services.

With the increasing challenges associated with delivering converged services across multi-vendor networks and the high cost of custom integration, the jointly developed Operations Support Systems (OSS) platform will help the entire service provider community better align network capabilities and costs with business demands.

The two companies are committed to long-term cooperation, bringing together Cisco’s Internet Protocol (IP) competence and Nokia Siemens Networks’ end-to-end telecommunications capability, as well as R&D and economic resources from both companies.

Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks will deliver a solution that will provide a common end-to-end network view of diverse network elements - across IP and mobile technologies - that are automatically discovered and represented as a virtual network model. Likewise, the solution will provide a complete view of network resources regardless of platforms, technologies or vendors. The platform will include basic fault, configuration, performance and security (FCAPS) management functionality as well as a variety of common functions, such as data acquisition and network element mediation, which will be utilized by higher-level OSS applications.

Nokia Siemens Networks brings to the collaboration its end-to-end telecommunications capability and the Open EMS Suite by Nokia, which provides capabilities of an element management system (EMS) and can be used to build EMS for various kinds of networks including transport, mobile, and broadband.

Along with its expertise in IP networking, Cisco also brings its Cisco Active Network Abstraction (ANA) management solution to the collaboration. Cisco ANA is already the basis for managing complex multi-vendor networks as well as providing the base platform for new management solutions, such as the Cisco Managed Services Solution. Cisco ANA also provides management support for the Cisco CRS-1 routing platform.

The broader intent of the collaboration is to provide a basis for helping OSS and other independent software vendors produce or extend their own applications more quickly.

Cisco and IBM already have a collaborative relationship in the OSS fault management and service assurance segment. This announcement extends that relationship to include interoperability with ANA.