Lucent Technologies Inc. last week launched a new venture to deliver operations support system products designed to help carriers better manage their networks and to reduce operating costs and end-users costs for cellular phone calls.
The new venture, called WatchMark Corp., is a combination of WatchMark Inc., which Lucent acquired from MediaOne International, and the wireless performance management software unit of Lucent’s Wireless Networks Group. The combined venture also will draw on the resources of Bell Labs, said Lucent.
WatchMark is the first company Lucent’s New Ventures Group has acquired. The WatchMark products fill a hole in Lucent’s range of OSS products-wireless performance management-said the company.
“WatchMark is a strategic play for Lucent New Ventures,” said Tom Uhlman, president of Lucent’s New Ventures Group. “It enables us to focus on an area-network decision support-that will grow as wireless carriers around the globe continue to build more efficient networks to better manage their business costs and to better serve their end-user customers.
“The WatchMark venture also adds strong value for Lucent’s Wireless Networks Group, which will integrate WatchMark’s software into its product line,” continued Uhlman.
The WatchMark product line includes four pieces:
WatchMark Pilot, a highly configurable and visual decision support system that brings together data from throughout an enterprise including coverage, alarms and network build information, allowing customer service agents to better address customer complaints and questions;
WatchMark Extreme, a flexible interface that allows customers to use the Web to access network information anytime and anywhere;
WatchMark Control, a mediation platform for creating network management applications, which can be configured for fault management and provisioning applications; and
WatchMark Design, a radio-frequency design and optimization tool.
The software platform can be sold directly to wireless carriers or can be resold by third-party original equipment manufacturers, said the companies.
“We want to make wireless decision support as straightforward as using the phone itself,” said Steve Roberts, president and chief executive officer of WatchMark. “The operation support system-or OSS-market for wireless is going very fast. There’s a reason for this, and you don’t have to have a background in radio to know why.
“Just look around on the street, or in restaurants, and you’ll see more people using cellular phones on all kinds of networks-analog and digital-than ever before,” continued Roberts. “They are using more minutes on these networks, and they are relying more and more on the quality and reliability of those networks than ever before. They are looking for cheaper calls and at the same time better quality calls.
“By providing this information readily to everyone from the CEO to the customer service representative to the engineering department, the enterprise becomes much more efficient,” said Roberts. “Decision making becomes more agile and proactive and the company can become more competitive. This means improvements in service quality, better deployment of resources and ultimately lower costs per call.”
