Telstra picks Syndesis for key OSS role

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 August 2006 19:54

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra has signed a multimillion dollar deal with Canadian company Syndesis for a key component of its network transformation project: software to reconcile network inventory data for its multiple network technologies held in multiple data repositories.

Syndesis' TrueSource product will be used to "address data quality and accuracy issues associated with multiple data repositories by enabling auto-discovery across Telstra's entire network and reconciliation of physical and logical inventory."

According to Syndesis CTO, Mark Nicholson: "Data integrity management is an essential component of a service provider's OSS/BSS architecture because it maximises operational efficiencies, reduces process errors, optimises network utilisation and establishes lean operator best practices."

John McInerney, director of IT transformation for Telstra, said that TrueSource had been chosen because of the company's "proven ability to maintain perpetual data integrity and accuracy, cleanse legacy inventory systems to facilitate migration, as well as its out-of-the-box capabilities." Telstra's selection of TrueSource follows TrueSource being chosen by BT in May for the same role in its massive NGN transformation project, 21CN.

Last November Syndesis announced a partnership with Fujitsu Australia which included plans to set up a "world-class, customer-facing operational support system (OSS) lab" in Burwood, Victoria, to showcase, among other things, a live multi-technology, provisioning-activation solution powered by Syndesis NetProvision and a data integrity management solution powered by Syndesis TrueSource. Fujitsu houses and staffs the lab and manages customer engagements and implementations as an independent software vendor. The two companies said they would jointly market their products and services in the Asia Pacific region.

Adam Boone, VP strategic marketing and product marketing at Syndesis told iTWire in May that the company had chosen to work with Fujitsu "because of their exceptional presence in the AsiaPac region... [which is] a region we have been looking to work in for quite some time." At that stage the company had no customers in the region. Fujitsu has no role in the Telstra deal, but Syndesis told iTWire: "We are still engaged with Fujitsu worldwide, especially in Japan."

The tie up with Fujitsu was followed, in March this year, by Syndesis opening an office in Melbourne from which to market and support its products across Asia and the Pacific. In May Alcatel, a major NGN supplier to Telstra, announced that it had signed a global partnership agreement with Syndesis enabling it to offer the Syndesis product suite as part of its own OSS portfolio to create an integrated offering "focuses on the end-to-end service delivery across access, aggregation and core, including subscriber-centric activation and discovery, in multi-vendor networks."