The Enhanced Service Manager: A service management system for next-generation networks

In this paper, we describe a service management product, the Enhanced Service Manager (eSM) that provides not only fast service development and easy maintenance but also performance, reliability, and Web-enabled provisioning. Competition is fierce in the business world, especially in telecommunications. Being first to offer a service is typically a key decision-making factor for service providers in selecting an operations support system product to manage their services. Furthermore, we have seen the operations network landscape evolving from switch-based to intelligent network-oriented services and from circuit-based to more data-oriented networks. This paper illustrates how open architecture elements such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA*), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Java*/JavaServer Pages* (JSP* )technology have been woven with off-the-shelf components into a product designed to meet current business needs. We discuss our architectural approach as well as a future direction.