FORE teams with Microsoft on service management product

These extensions, which include dynamic service subscription, provisioning and monitoring, are regarded as must-haves if a new generation of public retail and business-to-business services are ever going to take off. In turn, these extensions will need to be complemented by a new level of task automation, which will be required in order to keep spiraling management costs in check.

Due to the enormous potential of this new management-product generation, a growing number of players are offering first-generation products. The latest entrant is FORE Systems, a vendor that developed a prowess in the enterprise management arena with its fairly successful ForeView products. FORE, rather than taking the path of simply combing basic element management with a bigger, fatter, chunkier OSS look-alike, has instead opted to combine a few select technologies, including a set of centralized operations management services and directory-based management.

This functionality was recently demonstrated at Supercomm '99 in Atlanta. FORE's recently announced ForeView Foundation service management product was combined with Microsoft's newly announced Active OSS Framework to demonstrate customer self-provisioning and configuration of telephony and data services for network service providers.

FORE's partnership with Microsoft may offer an intriguing picture of what future customer configuration and provisioning of public voice and data services will really look like.

While over 25 other vendors also jointly announced some measure of support for Active OSS, FORE differentiated itself by its ability to demonstrate something that clearly indicated where service management was heading.

The one down side of FORE's effort, however, was the company's strong focus on Windows NT vs. Sun Solaris, which continues to be the dominant service management platform of choice for most service providers.