Vendor eyes telecom asset mess

In many ways, Tim Jasinski has a job to envy. As vice president of data services at Marriott International, he enjoys the responsibility of overseeing a network that touches 3,000 hotels and sales offices in dozens of countries and works with cutting-edge technologies, such as IP VPNs.

But the job isn't without its headaches, which include coordinating with a hodgepodge of domestic and overseas carriers and dealing with the chores associated with that, such as checking bill accuracy.

"We had spreadsheets from multiple systems," he says. "It was difficult to see what was going on."

In an effort to get a better handle on its telecom services, from bill checking to IP address tracking to network design, Marriott turned to a privately held software maker called Rivermine Software. The vendor is trying to make a name for itself in what it calls "enterprise telecom management" and in what analysts say is a largely unaddressed market.

Rivermine has morphed since 1989 from a consulting firm to a software maker for carriers and equipment makers to a management software provider for enterprise networks. The company ditched the name Telco Exchange in February, while grabbing $5 million in venture capital funding that it intends to use in part to aggressively market its products for the first time. Over the past few months, the company has stocked its top management ranks with refugees from big-name software companies such as PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems.

Rivermine's software centers around its Inventory Engine, in which customers keep track of and manage all of their telecom assets, from data circuits to routers to PBXs. From this repository users can create maps of their global network, specific regions or types of circuits from all of their carriers, or they can create maps that zero in on specific pieces of equipment.

The information in the Inventory Engine is updated regularly by the Service Order Management application. This is where users manage service and equipment procurement and installation. The software also has a network design element that's useful when users are looking to upgrade circuits or migrating to a new technology. The module also tracks all orders and service-level agreements.

An application called Finance Manager is used to audit telecom bills, allocate expenses to specific departments and process invoices.

Using information gathered in all three pieces of Rivermine's system, customers can run dozens of reports including average install time for all service providers, trouble-ticket resolution times and all circuits up for contract renewal.

"Enterprise telecom management allows users to not only see what makes up their network, but also how much it costs and how much they are using," says Doug Rutherford, Rivermine's vice president of marketing.

The software doesn't come cheap. A license runs from $150,000 to $700,000, with a possible $400,000 more in implementation costs. Marriott's Jasinski won't reveal how much the company spent on Rivermine software, but says it received an ROI in six months, half the time he had projected.