Actix Launches Next Generation NSM System to Automate RAN Performance Engineering

Actix Insight improves engineering efficiency to provide faster ROI

London, 16 November 2007 - Actix, the category leader in Network Status Management (NSM) solutions for mobile operators, today announced the introduction of Actix Insight, a next generation system designed to automatically identify, collate and diagnose common radio access network (RAN) problems. Insight has been designed to improve the efficiency of RAN engineering and troubleshooting by providing advanced performance diagnostics and intelligently prioritizing that information for presentation via a single user interface.

For many carriers, RAN engineering currently consists of numerous systems, including mini-tools, spreadsheets and databases, each providing their own task list. Actix Insight was developed to replace and automate many of these processes, and has been shown to provide a six-fold increase in performance engineering productivity.

As carriers increasingly turn towards the best practices provided by NSM technologies - which extend the principles of OSS into the radio subsystem, to bring scale and coordination advantages to highly fragmented processes and departments - they require more automated, systematic approaches to integrate and manage existing infrastructures. Actix Insight, built within the new Actix One integration framework, is the central engine designed to form a scalable backbone for future NSM deployments. It enables optimization of the network engineering process and more intelligent and effective management of the workflow through that process to bring large-scale automation to highly fragmented systems in the network performance arena.

“During a number of successful operator trials Actix Insight was shown to provide a far more useful list of daily tasks by giving network engineers visibility of the most service-affecting network issues while prioritizing those issues with the highest impact on customer satisfaction,” said Chris Larmour, Actix’ Chief Marketing Officer. “In addition to delivering significant improvements in productivity and effectiveness, engineers identified twice as many service affecting issues as were previously being identified, many of which were root causes missed by existing processes and tools. Trials also showed Actix Insight to reduce revenue leakage – the loss of traffic caused by network issues - by around eight per cent,” continued Larmour.

Actix Insight coordinates data from existing performance, configuration, and fault management systems, allowing carriers to retain and leverage their existing systems investments. Insight applies best practice rules to provide intelligent automated analysis on top of existing systems to quickly identify and diagnose complex network issues.

Key features of Actix Insight include:

§   RAN Data Repository
RAN performance, fault and configuration data is collated and consolidated all into a single RAN Data Repository.
§   Best Practice Analysis Server 
Actix Insight’s Analysis automates the identification and diagnosis of common RAN problems within 2G and 3G network technologies. A simple rules editor enables the customization of the behavior of the system to fit a mobile operator’s corporate, marketing and regional goals.
§   Task Based Approach
Identified RAN issues are presented in a simple, task-centric interface that provides engineers with a prioritized list of tasks based on the impact to the network, the business and the customer.
§   Map Based Investigation
RAN information is presented in a coordinated cell-centric interface that allows fast accesses to all information relating to each network issues from one source.
§   Management Reports & Audit
Management reports provide an overview of the efficiency and effectiveness of RAN engineering, allow better allocation and control of resources to process bottlenecks and the most critical service-affecting issues.