Appian's OSAP Brings New Intelligence to the Optical Edge, Breaking the Service Management and Bandwidth Bottlenecks Between Business Users and the Metro Network - Product Development

Cambridge Telcom Report, April 17, 2000

Appian Communications, innovators of intelligent networking products for the new optical edge of service provider networks, today introduced its premier product suite, the Optical Services Activation Platform (OSAP) 4800 and the AppianVista Services and Element Manager. Designed for placement in multi-tenant buildings, office parks and dense urban Central Office (CO) locations, the OSAP 4800 is the industry's first carrier-class optical access solution with the active intelligence to deliver soft-tunable bandwidth guarantees, multi-service interworking, and on-demand, end-to-end bandwidth provisioning. Service providers familiar with Appian's product strategy praise the Company's support of such innovative user services as customer self-provisioning of incremental bandwidth capacity within provider-defined boundaries. Also cited was Appian's plan to eliminate the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) service delivery bottleneck, allowing providers to transform their access network capacity into vital new, revenue-driving services.

"As a leading provider of bandwidth to the carrier marketplace, Williams Communications is focused on the need to search out technologies that will improve our provisioning costs and speed by an order of magnitude," said Matthew Bross, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Williams Communications (NYSE: WCG). "The ability to provide our carrier customers with software-managed 'on-demand' service provisioning without the need to roll a truck is key to our success. Appian's proposed solution clearly shows an understanding of the business economics driving service providers today."

The OSAP 4800 fully and economically meets the evolving access market's expanding customer volumes and universal service needs. With its powerful multi-service intelligence, the OSAP 4800 readily integrates into both existing SONET/SDH and emerging DWDM metro environments without forklift upgrades, interworking with all types of service provider CO and Point of Presence (POP) infrastructures, including TDM, ATM, frame relay, IP and Ethernet.

"The key to success in networking today is the linkage between bandwidth and services," noted Tom Nolle of CIMI Corporation. "Though that linkage is especially important in optical access products, many don't even attempt to offer it. Appian's approach to flexible bandwidth provisioning and their explicit service linkage make them a vendor to watch in this critical space."

TDM "Sipping Straw" Gives Way to New Applications, Total Cost of Ownership Economics & Revenue Potential

Currently, the capacity and service potential of the local loop is sharply limited by decades-old TDM technology that forms a narrow channel between the abundant bandwidth at the public network core and the available bandwidth within user organizations. TDM technology is characterized by a rigid, restrictive bandwidth hierarchy and cost-prohibitive scale-up rates that result in a local loop service bottleneck, which Appian CEO and Founder Mick Scully refers to as the TDM "sipping straw." This sipping straw slows the timely adoption of new applications such as B-2-B and e-commerce, adversely affects the feasibility and performance of ASP outsourcing initiatives, and inhibits user organizations from expanding their network services in response to organizational growth and dynamic market-driven needs. This sipping straw is also a barrier that blocks service providers from translating their direct customer access and the core network's rich bandwidth into services and profits.

Appian's OSAP replaces the TDM sipping straw with a new level of service deployment called "Etherband." Providing more flexible and scalable bandwidth beyond traditional access technologies, Appian's innovative Etherband architecture leverages the compelling economics and ubiquity of the industry's dominant technologies: Ethernet in the customer premise environment, and SONET and DWDM in the service provider transport network. Based on patent pending distributed packet switching technology, Appian's solution lets service providers both guarantee bandwidth from 64Kbps to 10Gbps per service, per customer, as well as dynamically change the guarantees as needed on a customer-by-customer basis. And utilizing Appian's patent pending Optical Data Protection technology, OSAP meets the public network's most stringent reliability and survivability requirements.

"The access market is in the earliest stages of a radical architectural and service delivery revolution, creating exciting opportunity," observed Paul Johnson, Managing Director, Robertson Stephens. "Appian is enabling access providers to deliver as-needed bandwidth that reflects the user organization's own native service flexibility, scalability and definable burst needs, affording early service provider adopters a huge potential competitive advantage. With reliable, per-customer service definition and delivery that supports tens of thousands of users per deployment, Appian is setting the access market's 'carrier-class' standard for new, next generation networks."