Ontology, provider of really cool OSS data search and data integration technology, scores a live customer in T-Mobile Czech.
It says here that Ontology has been deployed by the Czech T-Mobile op co.
Ontology’s products provide a means of pulling together data from multiple sources and joining it up to give a single end-to-end view of, for example, your network inventory. It does this using clever semantic search capabilities that I don’t understand, but I guess it’s a bit like automagically working out that two objects in two separate data sources share the same name, or location ID, or whatever, and merging the two object models in to one complete model.
Of course it’s much harder than that as data quality issues tend to get in the way, even if the data can technically be joined-up. And I’ve worked with telcos wanting to consolidate multiple inventory data sources only to find there are no common ‘keys’ between one data source and another: They know they have E1 services terminating in the switch centre; They know they have E1 services on their SDH rings; But they can’t match one object record to the other.
From the PR – Pavel Stamenov, Head of Access Network Configuration Department at T-Mobile CZ. “The solution allows our users to work with the transmission planning spread sheets uninterrupted, with zero or minimum downtime prior its final migration to the network inventory system.”
What’s interesting about that is it is not simply providing an umbrella data model, but it’s also enabling business processes and a migration path from spreadsheets to the Amdocs network inventory system. Sound’s a lot like Ontology is now delivering solutions that are similar to those that Celona used to offer.
Now, I don’t know how much business Ontology does, but I do know how hard it is for smaller OSS vendors to get a customer to agree to do a press release. Great to see a company like Ontology, with some really innovative technology, getting deployed and getting recognised for it.