CISCO SERVICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM SIMPLIFIES MANAGER'S JOB.

Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, has announced the first components of the Cisco Service Management System, a comprehensive suite of network and service management applications that allow service providers to plan, provision, monitor and bill for differentiated services. The Cisco Service Management (CSM) applications are specifically designed to meet the reliability, scalability and performance requirements demanded by service providers to meet growing customer expectations. CSM components that are now available are Cisco Info Center (CIC), Cisco Access Manager (CAM) and Cisco WAN Manager (CWM). "Cisco is continuing to deliver products and services that allow service providers to offer new, value-added services, deploy them quickly and automate their processes wherever possible," said Herb Madan, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Network and Service Management Business Unit. "The Cisco Service Management System enables service providers to meet these requirements while at the same time scaling the performance and reliability of their network infrastructure to meet the increasing expectations of their customers." Profitable Service Operations Cisco Info Center is a real-time, high-performance service-level monitoring and diagnostic tool that simplifies centralized fault and alarm management by providing a consolidated view of events in multitechnology and multivendor networks. Designed to help network operators focus on critical network events, CIC offers easy-to-use tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform event filtering, alarm correlation, rule definitions and flexible network alarm viewing and partitioning. This highly scalable product consolidates and correlates Layer2 and Layer3 fault and alarm information from multiple sources and technologies; it filters, duplicates and processes the events in a real-time database and provides customized views of the network. CIC specifies and monitors guaranteed service-levels, providing valuable insight into service-level agreement (SLA) conformance. Service providers can also use CIC's information partitioning capabilities to make Web-based Customer Network Management (CNM) and Virtual Private Networks (VPN) available to their customers as an added service dimension. "Cisco Info Center offers a lot of flexibility in consolidating events and alarms from many different vendors and technologies allowing us to provide simplified service level management to our internal and external customers," said David Levandowsky, senior network engineer at Arizona Public Service. "This has enabled us to fulfill business efforts by providing service-level monitoring and reporting on faults and alarms, as well as performance levels based on individual customer requirements." Element and Network Management Cisco Access Manager is a targeted network access management solution built specifically to manage high-density, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and modem access solutions. This Web-based management system is designed for large, complex, distributed access environments and facilitates deployment and operation through configuration, monitoring and reporting features. In order to optimize WAN links, Point-of-Presence (POP)-centric management is introduced with the Cisco IOS(R) software-based system controller for local polling of managed devices. The polled data is then stored on a local disk and transferred in bulk to the central management application. By separating network data traffic from management traffic, CAM reduces the amount of polling across the WAN link. This reduction in data traffic sent over the WAN link reduces overall WAN costs and optimizes WAN bandwidth for network traffic. CAM's configuration, monitoring and historical report generation features help service providers quickly deploy, expand and troubleshoot dial access networks while minimizing operational costs and maximizing the availability of remote access systems. Other components of CAM such as Cisco IOS Manager, Modem Firmware Manager and Configuration File Manager, allow network operators to schedule image download and manipulate configuration changes for maintenance purposes. Cisco WAN Manager, formerly known as StrataView Plus, is a comprehensive network and element management system that enables operations, maintenance and management of WAN multiservice networks. CWM has a robust, scalable architecture that meets the demands of end-to-end, Layer2 configuration, fault and performance management and operations. This application supports small networks with a few hundred virtual connections, as well as large, service provider backbones with hundreds of thousands of virtual connections. CWM can also be integrated into third-party applications such as Operations Support Systems (OSSs) and other components of CSM. CSM applications can be deployed together to support integrated Layer2/Layer3 (multitechnology) solutions like quality-of-service (QoS), virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet telephony, or in a modular fashion to support service offerings like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Frame Relay. Each CSM application has a rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate service automation and enable it to be easily integrated into existing operations support systems (OSSs) or augmented by third-party solutions. Pricing and Availability Cisco Info Center is available now with a base price starting at $70,000. Cisco Access Manager has a base package price of $30,000 for support of 15,000 access ports. Support for additional 15,000 port licenses can be purchased for $15,000 each. Cisco WAN Manager is also available now with a license price of $15,000 for 200 or fewer physical user ports and $30,000 for more than 200 physical user ports. For more information, call 408/527-0600.