BT's Product and Systems Migration Project wins the Business Service Innovation honour at the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards 2010

London, June 15th, 2010 – Today, Ontology Systems announces that OSS/CAD, the groundbreaking application that uses semantics to unify OSS/BSS and infrastructure, was central to BT's winning entry in this year’s prestigious Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards 2010. BT's entry, "Optimising and Accelerating Migrations of Products and Systems", triumphed in the Business Service Innovation award category. 

This year’s awards attracted hundreds of nominations from the readers of Global Telecoms Business for the industry’s most innovative projects. The winners, as selected by the judging panel, represent the most innovative projects in the industry worldwide.

The award entry itself was based on the cutting-edge work of a team from both BT and Ontology Systems. They used OSS/CAD to tackle the tough challenges in planning migrations from legacy to next generation products and services – in particular understanding the mass of data around products, systems, networks, customers, and processes which may be held in a large number of legacy systems. They started by using OSS/CAD to discover and model dependencies among products, processes, systems, networks and customers. Once they had a model, OSS/CAD showed them the knock-on effects of product migration, letting them play through "what-if" scenarios to determine the optimal order of migration steps to a strategic target.

John Wittgreffe, Corporate ICT Chief Researcher, BT Innovate and Design commented: "The Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards are a great platform to showcase new and innovative methodologies and technologies that can impact business, and this win shows the ingenuity of the team and the importance of tools such as OSS/CAD to tackle complex problems in a new and exciting way. Our solution revealed benefits to the planning stage including 30%-80% cost reduction, improved data cleansing and a trusted one-truth model, and importantly shorter planning times which bring forward the ultimate benefits of any migration exercise. This comfortably surpassed all the other manual- and tool-based methods attempted."

Nektarios Georgalas, Corporate ICT Principal Researcher, BT Innovate and Design, added: "Delivering successful complex transformations quickly and cost-effectively is instrumental for growth in a recessionary market. With Ontology's OSS/CAD, our toolset maximises ROI and reduces migration risk by letting us:

- track complex element dependencies,

- analyse "what-if" scenarios,

- make decisions with full knowledge of customer impact,

- avoid conflicts and inefficiencies by harmoniously and optimally planning parallel migration activities.

As a result we can deliver multi-million transformations right-first-time, faster and with significant cost savings. It means we improve our margins and focus our newly-transformed operations on core revenue-generating activities much earlier."

Benedict Enweani, CEO, Ontology Systems concluded: "We are pleased that OSS/CAD is able to play such a key role in the BT toolset, and that the communications industry has now recognised OSS/CAD's groundbreaking capabilities. Together, BT and Ontology have demonstrated that OSS/CAD's use of semantics to federate and search legacy systems achieves, in a few weeks, what would have required many months to accomplish with traditional approaches. This presents to service providers the first practical product-based alternative to big-bang integration, and it addresses their need to better understand and manage complex OSS/BSS infrastructures."

In presenting the Awards, Alan Burkitt-Gray, editor of Global Telecoms Business, commented: “This is the fourth time we’ve run our Innovation Awards and each year we’ve seen that the industry is working harder and harder to deliver exciting and innovative services to its customers worldwide. Congratulations to all the award winners. The industry is seeing a wave of innovation which is making a huge difference — to the companies working in the industry and to all of us in business and as consumers. They are making such a difference to the world. We want to celebrate what they are doing.”

The Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards 2010 took place in London 7th June 2010.  More information can be found at: http://www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com/Stub/InnovationAwards2010.html