DTJ Number 3 September 1987 - Digital Technical Journals

New Products• Present that information to users in easy-to-useformats (color graphics, topology maps,histograms, tables, lists, fo rms , and batchreports)Many of the lessons learned from designingmanagement software, such as the DECnet monitorfor data networks, also apply to voice networkmanagement.Telecommunications NetworkManagementDigital's earliest telecommunications managementproduct provided simple cost-allocationand traffic-management reports. This capabilityhas evolved to allow users to track costs andexpenses and to generate billing invoices. Userscan now capture historical data and perform predictionanalyses on it.The products developed are based on an officeautomation system that also provides genericapplication-generation tools. Thus users can nowintegrate their telecommunications managementfunctions with the rest of their business communicationneeds. This integration means thatreports, which are really just document files, cannow, after processing, be annotated and shared(via electronic mail) With people from otherdepartments.Evolution of Vo ice ManagementThe TELEPRO product, introduced in 1981,was Digital's first entry into the field of voicenetworks. This early telecommunicationsproduct was designed to collect station messagedetail recorder (SMDR) information fromPBX systems and to generate basic cost accountingreports . These reports included roll-upsof telephone charges for various subgroups,such as departments, cost centers, and the like.There were also reports providing networktraffic information, such as trunk usage andcall cost distribution. In the latter case, informationwas reported on a per-trunk basis andsubdivided by times of day over a monthlyperiod. For example, a manager could seehow many calls on a particular tieline exceededone minute, how many two minutes, etc.,for each day of the month. This informationgave the manager better analyses of the performanceof the network, helping him to makebetter decisions about proper network configuration.Digttal TecbnicaljournalNo . 3 September 1986This early product was intended to be a standalone,inexpensive, and easy-to-operate product.The processors initially chosen were the PDP- 1 1family. This choice gave end users the ability to.choose independently from; a variety of processors,disks, and memory configurations. Thusthey could tailor their systems to fit the require-'ments imposed by their data vo lumes.To further extend this prqduct's functionality,we added Digital's databasd query language andreport writer, the DATATRIEVE system. This additiongave TELEPRO's developers the ability tobuild a powerfu l set of standard reports in asmall amount of time. With this set, users couldcreate their own custom,built reports. As aresult, the early product fit well with the needsof the then current market for telecommunicationsmanagement software.When this early product was introduced, manycompeting systems were based on personal computers,which did not have the same extendedfunctionality as the PDP-11 i system. These smallcomputers simply could no provide the storagecapacity or processing power required by largecustomers. Their applictions needed largetables for accurate call pricing, and reports ofvarying detail with information stored as low asthe call record level. Many PC-based productstried various ways to get around these limita:tions. Some approximated call prices (by regionrather than explicit area codejexchange) ; otherscreated summary data on the fly (thereby not savingthe raw data) ; still others used a combinationof the two . All these attempts meant that therequired information might not be available if auser wanted to create his o;wn reports.Meeting Market . NeedsIAround 1984, because of the breakup of AT&TCorporation, the requiremnts for voice managementbegan to expand rapidly, beyond TELE­PRO's capabilities. Owners, of large PBX systemswere now reselling telecommunication services,for example, to landlords of buildings, universities,and even hospitals. Unfortunately, TELEPROwas limited to tracking expenses rather than generatinginvoices. Thus the P/FM (PBX facilitiesmanagement) product was created to providethis additional functionality.As with the DECnet monitor, we soon realizedthe limitations of the PDP- 11 architecture for'supporting this additional functionality. To solvethis problem, we first debded to convert the. IIIi125