Kaj Juul-Pedersen, Chairman 2operate and Lars Moltsen, CEO 2operate

Automation of Network Troubleshooting

InterComms talks to Kaj Juul-Pedersen, Chairman 2operate and Lars Moltsen, CEO 2operate, about the automation of network troubleshooting processes using advanced mathematics

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Kaj Juul-Pedersen is chairman of 2operate. He received his Master’s degree from the Technical University of Denmark in 1971 and joined Ericsson in 1972. He has held top positions in Denmark (incl president of Ericsson Denmark 1990-95), Sweden, the UK, and Poland. In 1997 Mr. Juul-Pedersen became the President of Telia in Denmark when it was establishing itself as a full service operator. Since 2001, he has been an active investor and a professional board member through his company Sitella. In 2002 he initiated the acquisition of NetTest from GN Great Nordic. He served as chairman until it was sold to Anritsu in 2005. In 2007, he became a board member of Tektronix until it was acquired by Danaher.

Lars Moltsen is the CEO of 2operate. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1996. He worked in telecom and software R&D in Hugin Expert and Nokia Networks until 2003 when started his career as an entrepreneur by starting Moltsen Intelligent Software. In 2007 this company was sold to Wirtek. In 2009 he gathered a strong team, secured financing, and started 2operate to take a new troubleshooting automation concept to the market.

Q: What are the key problems facing the network operators in terms of Quality of Service?
A: The key issue is that the number of smart phones is currently exploding and network capacity, network quality, and the right business models need to be in place to support the boom in use of data services with different QoS requirements. There is a risk that this will not happen if the business models are not in place to exploit this opportunity, and there is a risk that the cost of ramping up capacity and quality will be too high. The latter depends on how much the operator is able to automate its processes.

Q: How is 2operate’s 2solve solution able to provide the higher level of troubleshooting process automation?
A: The short version is that 2operate has based its solution on advanced technology/mathematics, which was originally developed to solve medical diagnostic problems, and which is perfect for any diagnostics problem. By using this technology it is possible to automate complex diagnostics, even to a degree where you can automate the creation and dispatch of repair actions. This allows us to provide the highest level of automation in pro-active troubleshooting processes in the market.

We have seen that operators typically maintain a mixed process for troubleshooting problems in the network. First, they need to be efficient in re-acting to problems reported by unsatisfied customers. For this purpose, tools e.g. for tracing calls are essential. Second, they want to avoid customers calling because of problems, so they establish a pro-active troubleshooting process following three basic steps: 1. Scan the network for problems, 2. Diagnose each network element with degraded performance to determine the root cause, 3. Resolve the problem through repair actions scheduled in a trouble ticket system and validate the fix.

It is clear that the more problems you can solve pro-actively the better, and 2solve is our solution to support the three-step pro-active troubleshooting process with a maximum of automation. The bottleneck is step 2 (diagnostics). In particular, in the radio access domain the level of complexity gets very high. By using the right technology we are able to automate diagnostics. The closest you get to diagnostics automation among our competitors is alarm correlation and sometimes rule-based systems or decision tree algorithms (flow charts) which do not scale very well.

Q: With cost being a top issue to the operators how can 2solve help in reducing physical costs?
A: 2solve would ideally be part of a business transformation project. It is clear that the tool will reduce operational expenditures from savings on resources for solving incidents (which typically takes on average 30 minutes each when talking radio access). However, the deskilling effect you get from using 2solve allows non-experts to conduct troubleshooting and be productive. This means that you can set up teams monitoring and troubleshooting both the networks (GSM, UMTS, LTE) as well as all the services running in the network.

Q: Where can readers see online and practical product demonstrations?
A: Readers can go to our website, www.2operate.com, and find a quick, recorded demo. It is also possible to sign up for public webinars to get a full-length presentation and demonstration. People often get surprised by the simplicity of conducting troubleshooting with 2solve. We have spent a lot of product development time repeating our mission statement, “Simplifying Troubleshooting”, to ourselves...

Q: How is 2solve being deployed at the moment and where are the key markets for the company?
A: Status is that since the company was started in 2009 based on research done in collaboration with Orange Labs, Telefonica I+D, the European Space Agency, and two universities, we initially focused on developing a strong platform. We had the official marketing kickoff at the TM Forum Management World 2010 conference in May. We have now conducted three pilot projects, all with potential partners in Europe. Right now, we are running the first pilot with a Danish operator, and the second one is being planned.

We are currently marketing the product mainly in Europe, but we also have two good opportunities (through partners) with networks in India, which is a very attractive market, and our sales arguments are even better in growth regions where there is a lack of experienced personnel. We also have the first leads now in the Middle East and in the Americas. With the help of partners, we believe 2solve could be offered globally in one year from now.

Q: How is 2operate working to develop future OSS markets?
A: This is exactly what we are part of (developing the future OSS market). Network operators are currently executing a lot of business transformation projects, but to a large extent they do it with the old OSS tools. Yes, they are reducing the number of solution providers because they had too many of them, but often this is more a matter of simplifying procurement processes than replacing outdated systems with more modern and innovative ones.

2operate has a strategy to stay up front as top innovators in automation of network operations. We are constantly looking for opportunities to extend the 2solve system with more “troubleshooting simplification” and we are also considering automation in other network operations processes. We are doing this in collaboration with customers, universities, partners, and sometimes even competitors when there is a win-win opportunity.

Q: What are the key areas that the operators will need to develop to stay ahead of the competition?
A: Our best advice would be to stay focused on core business. Operators’ primary asset is the (mobile) access they provide to subscribers, and they need to make sure this part of the business is secured (sufficient capacity and good quality at reasonable costs). Once the network is safe, they can start exploiting the intimate, direct access to subscribers and build revenues from new services, including cloud. If an operator does not control the costs of running the network or is not able to provide the required capacity and quality, they will risk loosing the battle.

For more information visit:
www.2operate.com