Autonomic Telecommunications Networks

This "case study" is an amalgam of a number of Blaze Advisor business rules customers. Each of these is in production and together show the potential for business rules in particular to change the way telecommunications company's deliver services by making their networks more self-repairing.

• A global internet backbone provider with over 1,000 Points of Presence uses business rules to resolve network faults and alerts. Each PoP embeds a Blaze Advisor services that provides rules-driven expertise on how to handle network errors and alerts without necessitating more staff.
• Tracking and correlating system-wide network alarm information is a very difficult, time-consuming process. A major cellular network uses Blaze Advisor rules to analyze system-wide alarms and information gathered from the entire network. These rules allow Blaze Advisor to determine the uptime/downtime for all equipment on the network and so route calls through equipment that is running to ensure large revenue customers are content. Not only does this reduce the process time for alarm correlation and filtering, it allows company experts to change rules quickly and immediately deploy those changes.
  This is combined with rules to determine what compensation is owed to major customers in the case of system failure. The rules analyze system outage information against signed Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) for customers to determine if a system outage violated the SLA. If the SLA was violated more rules determine what level and type of compensation is due to the client. This proactive approach leads to increased customer satisfaction.
• A major telecommunications software vendor is using business rules to integrate systems and resources spread throughout an enterprise and is automating the processes such as security control, load-balancing and failure handling across the network. This makes it much easier to ensure that company policies and objectives are applied across a complex network of components.
• Lastly a very large telecommunications company is using business rules to handle the times when even an autonomic system fails. It uses business rules to assign field service engineers based on region, product expertise, urgency etc in response to system failures. Assigning the "right" engineer used to require extensive knowledge from field managers and this slowed response times. The rules-based system ensures accurate assignment of field service engineers while allowing rules about new engineers or products to be easily modified and deployed.