Appian Communications Partners With Leading Service Management Vendors to Speed Optical Service Delivery and Revenue.

Business/Technology Editors

BOXBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 15, 2001

Appian Teams with Micromuse, Portal, and Emperative to Speed

Optical Network Time-to-Service

Appian Communications today announced that it has joined with several of the telecommunication industry's top service management vendors to maximize the service creation, delivery and revenue potential of optical networks. By integrating the advanced service delivery capabilities of Appian's Optical Services Activation Platform(TM) (OSAP(TM)) and AppianVista(TM) Service Manager with leadership service provisioning, fault management, reporting, and billing/SLA management solutions, Appian and its partners enable service providers to move rapidly beyond selling transport to selling high-value, high margin services that leverage the revenue potential of optical networks.

Teaming with Appian today is service management market leader Micromuse (NASDAQ: MUSE), the leading provider of realtime fault management and service assurance software. Appian recently joined the Micromuse Developers Alliance Program(TM) as a Netcool Solutions Partner. Also teaming with Appian are Portal Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: PRSF), the leader in customer management and billing software for providers of broadband, wireless Internet, and next-generation communications services; and Emperative, the industry's hottest innovator in on-demand broadband provisioning software.

"Service Providers are operating in an extremely competitive environment and they're aggressively seeking opportunities to be first with new, differentiated services. A pivotal factor in achieving time-to-service is how quickly and easily a solution can be integrated into back office provisioning, reporting and billing systems," noted Deb Mielke, principal analyst with Treillage Network Strategies. "The bar is heading even higher as carriers look toward opportunities such as tiered wholesaler/retailer/subscriber services and customer provisioning to further differentiate their offerings," continued Mielke. "Appian and its partners are launching an important initiative that clearly recognizes aggressive service delivery and revenue goals can only be achieved through strategic partnerships that short-cut reactive, box-at-a time integration into existing service delivery systems. The program is the right move -- at the right time -- for giving providers the agility to develop, deliver and recognize revenues from innovative, on-demand services."

As part of the partnering initiative, Appian is collaborating with partners to define integrated optical service management solutions supported by joint marketing, interoperability verification, and cooperative development initiatives that are designed to enable rapid time to competitive service offerings. In support of the partnerships, Appian is making available the AppianVista Integration Tool Kit, which includes standards-based CORBA, XML, and HTML management API's, to simplify and accelerate the development of partner integration modules. AppianVista is key to the partnerships, operating as an intelligent service management front end that aggregates and correlates service related information from the OSAPs deployed at the optical service edge. New dynamic service requests, SLA-related fault information, events that correlate to a specific service outage, and usage based billing information are examples of the information aggregated by AppianVista and presented to partners via standard APIs to enable faster time to a richer set of services for providers.

The New Service Management Model: Intelligent, Dynamic, Revenue Directed

The industry is at a turning point, moving beyond the deployment of optical capacity to the delivery of differentiated services such as Ethernet Private Line, Bandwidth Trading, and high speed, Ethernet capable Internet Access services. Delivery of these services is dependent on optical service edge equipment that enables scalable, burstable, and on-demand packet services over the first mile on-ramp connecting customers to the optical core. It also requires an integrated service management solution that reaches a new service delivery bar that includes:

-- Full flow through provisioning of end-to-end services that are dynamically activated and customer enabled;

-- Sophisticated internal and external reporting systems fed by intelligent optical edge devices that inform complex SLAs while also providing usage-level feedback to enable up-selling of services;

-- Accounting and billing solutions that accept new on demand service options with usage-based or "pay by the drink" billing models;

-- Intelligent fault management solutions that reduce time to repair to meet service up-time metrics that translate directly into profitability or lost revenue based on SLA commitments.

"Partnerships are mandatory for service providers to get to these rich service management capabilities ahead of the competition and we are delighted to be working with partners of such world class caliber. Our ability to define and deliver a new model for intelligent service management will translate into new potential for carriers to achieve unprecedented service innovation, differentiation, and customer loyalty," concluded Anand Parikh, Appian Founder and Vice President of Business Development and Product Management.

Partner Quotes:

"The new optical services network is only profitable if it is stable and manageable," said Rosemary Hill, Global Director, Micromuse Developers Alliance. "We look forward to working with Appian to give service providers the comprehensive, useable network management information and service availability views they need to control and readily expand their networks, enabling them to leverage their growing market opportunities."

"Partnering with next generation infrastructure vendors such as Appian enables service providers to increase revenues by offering high-valued, differentiated optical network services. With Portal Software's Infranet(R), providers can create and support complex pricing plans and usage-based billing models that easily scale to meet customer growth rates," said Vijay Iyer, vice president of market development at Portal Software. Portal Software and Appian have agreed to work together to deliver an integrated solution.

"The successful introduction of new, higher revenue carrier services will depend on the ability of service providers to provision these services efficiently across increasingly diverse transport infrastructures," said Abraham Gutman, Emperative President and CEO. "Emperative is partnering with Appian to ensure simplified service provisioning at the optical service edge, and creating the new service deployment framework needed to optimize the stability, consistency, and service scalability of innovative carrier services.

About Appian Communications

Appian Communications is the first to deliver the optical service edge solution service providers require for offering scalable, soft-tunable Ethernet plus TDM services over today's optical network infrastructure. Appian's award-winning Optical Service Activation Platform (OSAP) and AppianVista Services Manager allow providers to replace their previously rigid, circuit-optimized first mile with a service intelligent solution that enables 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." The Appian team has helped drive the market leadership of respected telecom systems developers such as Lucent (NASDAQ: LU), Nortel (NYSE: NT) and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO). For more information about Appian Communications, please visit the Web site at www.appiancom.com.

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. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.