Appian Communications Announces Industry's First Service Manager For the Optical Service Edge.

Business/Technology Editors

BOXBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 23, 2000

AppianVista Simplifies Service Delivery, Lowers Service Cost, and

Enables New Service Options.

Appian Communications, the first to deliver the optical service edge intelligence and scalability to open the first mile to new service revenues, today introduced AppianVista, the industry's first service manager for the optical service edge. AppianVista is acknowledged among service providers and analysts as setting the bar for managing the delivery of optical services with simplicity, scale and time-to-market advantages as providers deploy high growth, next generation packet service offerings. AppianVista, in conjunction with the company's award-winning Optical Services Activation Platform (OSAP), enables providers to now break through the first mile bottleneck of their optical networks to deliver scalable, dynamically activated packet plus TDM services over today's existing infrastructure.

Joseph Varello, Vice President of Business Development for Everest Broadband Networks, one of the industry's most innovative and rapidly growing customer carriers, noted: "Our on-demand delivery of highly differentiated services is the key to winning and retaining customers in this tremendously competitive market. AppianVista represents the industry's first solution with the power to manage and fully realize our network's rich service potential. It provides the scalability to manage our growing nationwide customer base, with the intelligence and simplicity to give our customers, ASPs and affiliates the service level control they need. Its unprecedented provisioning and control flexibility translates into a clear ability to sell more innovative services at the flick of a switch, making AppianVista a driver for an important new class of high-revenue, customer-provisioned services."

Until now, service providers have been constrained by decades-old, manually provisioned TDM technology that has formed a narrow, static channel separating the capacity of the optical core from the high-speed demand of enterprise Local Area Networks (LAN). As providers now ramp to deliver next generation packet services, they see the opportunity to break through this bottleneck by leveraging the simplicity and scale of Ethernet as a universal service interface. When combined with the OSAP's ability to deliver software tunable Ethernet services to customers, AppianVista now provides the critical service management tool needed to simplify service delivery, lower operating costs, assure smooth integration with existing operational systems and provide a path to new value-added offerings.

"AppianVista is the pivotal factor that enables the Appian product suite to serve as a comprehensive platform for immediate delivery of new, higher margin service products," said Deb Mielke, principal analyst with Treillage Network Strategies. "AppianVista is truly the 'secret sauce' that brings the tremendous capability of Appian's OSAP products to life, enabling providers to differentiate their service offerings from competitors, and sustain and expand market share in this extraordinarily competitive and evolving market."

AppianVista - The Intelligence to Simplify Optical Service Delivery

AppianVista is a carrier class optical service manager that steps well beyond box-level element managers to transition the first mile to a dynamic service arena where providers can lead the market in the delivery of innovative new services. Delays and high lifecycle costs are eliminated as truck rolls and on-site upgrades are replaced with dynamic service activation. Services can be expanded and new services added from a simple, centralized and Web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) that meets customer growth and on-demand requirements within minutes.

AppianVista's partitioned management views enable new carrier/customer business models with the ability to delegate management and monitoring privileges to different wholesaler, retailer and subscriber user levels. With this model, a wholesale provider deploying OSAPs on its network can allocate service level management and monitoring privileges to its retail partners who in turn may offer a rich set of on-demand provisioning and service level management features to end user subscribers. With the ability to scale to ten's of thousands of users, each with their own set of privileges, AppianVista is the first service manager to truly enable service retailer and subscriber self-provisioning and management controls.

Based on a fully integrated SQL database, this powerful system effectively obsoletes first generation, Web-enabled, "box at a time" configuration and statistical reporting tools. By offering network wide service views, network operators have full visibility into network assets and resources used, eliminating the complexity providers have historically faced in manually tracking and assessing changes each time a new circuit or service is provisioned. AppianVista's advanced event correlation and transaction services allow providers to readily track changes that affect service level agreements and billing. Full flow-through provisioning of end-to-end services is enabled via AppianVista CORBA, XML, HTML, TL1 or LDAP interfaces, which also provide rapid integration into the billing and service level management applications of existing OSS or NMS systems. Built-in database replication, load sharing and fail-over capabilities further assure carrier class scale with full follow-the-sun operation.

Appian Vice President of Marketing Karen Barton concluded: "AppianVista is the critical service enabling tool service providers need to now open the optical network to new high-speed business services. It allows providers to eliminate the constraints of the previously rigid first mile, to deliver next generation value-added offerings, including customer self-provisioning, just-in-time bandwidth options, simplified multi-service migration strategies and emerging dynamic bandwidth trading opportunities."

Availability

AppianVista is currently deployed in several beta sites.

About Appian Communications

Appian Communications is the first to deliver the optical service edge solution service providers require for offering next generation, soft-tunable Ethernet services over today's existing network infrastructure. Appian's award-winning OSAP and AppianVista Services Manager allow providers to replace their previously rigid, circuit-optimized first mile with a service intelligent solution that delivers multi-service flexibility and scale through a simple Ethernet "plug in the wall." Time to market is assured with the ability to deploy these services across today's widely deployed SONET/SDH and DWDM infrastructures. Appian is a high momentum company that has been recognized at SUPERCOMM 2000's SUPERQuest Awards, was named a "Red Hot Startup" by America's Network, and was named one of Telecommunications Magazine's "Hot Startups to Watch in 2000." Its management, development and delivery teams have helped drive the market leadership of respected telecom systems developers such as Lucent (NASDAQ: LU), Nortel (NYSE: NT) and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO).

Appian Communications, the Appian Communications logo, Optical Services Activation Platform, OSAP, AppianVista and Optical Data Protection are trademarks and Intelligent Optical Edge is a service mark of Appian Communications, Inc.