HP Announces New OpenView Products for the Development and Deployment of Telecommunications Management Network Solutions

Business Wire, Sept 18, 1995

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 1995-- Hewlett-Packard Company today announced new network-management solutions for the telecommunications industry, including HP OpenView Managed Object Toolkit (MOT) 1.0, for faster application development, and a more reliable and robust HP OpenView Distributed Management (DM) 4.1, HP's industry-leading Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) platform. In addition, HP said it will demonstrate new technologies for telecommunications management at Telecom 95, in Geneva, Oct. 3-11.

"Customers have told us that they want faster and more robust solutions for managing their telecommunications network environments," said Robert Hoog, general manager of HP's Network and System Management Division. "With the introduction of MOT 1.0 and DM 4.1, HP is providing customers with industry-leading solutions that will allow them to do their jobs faster and more productively than ever before."

HP OPENVIEW MANAGED OBJECT TOOLKIT 1.0

HP OpenView Managed Object Toolkit (MOT) 1.0 delivers on HP's strategy to provide telecommunications application developers with a comprehensive set of integrated tools that facilitate the development of CMIS-based solutions. MOT is a new TMN tool that dramatically improves developer productivity. As a result, companies developing applications based on HP's DM 4.1 platform can deliver solutions to their customers faster.

All sophisticated telecommunications-management applications comprise manager and agent components. The manager component resides on a central system and is accessed by an operator; the agent component resides remotely and actively monitors the health of a critical device such as a telephone switching system.

The MOT 1.0 accelerates the development of the agent and manager components, a significant and time-consuming activity in the deployment of TMN-based solutions. Before the MOT, each agent had to be hand-coded, that is built from scratch -- a process that previously took weeks or months. Now, in only minutes, the MOT can transform a GDMO specification automatically into an OSI-conformant agent. This faster base-agent-generation time allows developers to spend more time on the value-added components of their application, such as processing data gathered by the agent or communicating with, and controlling, external devices. All of these MOT features allow developers to bring their solutions to market faster than ever before.

"The evolution of TMN application development can be compared to the evolution of machined-part production," said Lisa Speaker, MOT product manager for HP's Network and System Management Division. "In the past, skilled craftsmen built parts by hand, directly from raw materials. Today, numerically controlled machines can be fed a part specification, together with the raw materials, and automatically produce a machined part. After machining, the part can be fine-tuned with additional hand finishing, providing a process that produces parts faster, with higher quality and repeatability. Think of MOT 1.0 as providing the productivity gain of a numerically controlled machine."

The MOT provides the complete CMIS agent infrastructure. A MOT-generated agent handles all of the fundamental CMIS services, including the receipt and transmission of CMIS requests and responses. This infrastructure reduces the time-intensive task of implementing the following routines:

o receiving requests;

o validating requests;

o routing scoped and filtered requests; and

o transmitting responses, including linked replies.

The agent-creation process is further simplified because developers now can use an intuitive C interface that insulates them from the complexities of XOM/XMP APIs, a standard API for TMN application development. For example, without using the MOT 1.0, a developer would have to write more than 200 lines of code to create a simple 'get' request using XOM/XMP. With MOT 1.0, such agent development only takes four lines of code. By drastically reducing the amount of manual coding, developer errors are reduced, and quality and productivity are increased. In addition, the code-generation process provides greater code consistency, thus improving code quality and maintainability as well.

With the MOT 1.0, manager development also is enhanced through a convenient C interface that insulates the developer from complex XOM object manipulations. This interface may result in as much as a tenfold reduction in the lines of code required to prepare manager requests and process agent responses.

MOT 1.0 -- PART OF A COMPREHENSIVE TOOLKIT FOR DEVELOPERS

MOT 1.0 is part of an integrated suite of tools and platforms that facilitate and accelerate the development and deployment of TMN solutions. These tools are targeted at various phases of the software development lifecycle: requirements analysis, high-level design, detailed design and implementation.

HP's first TMN developer tool, the GDMO Modeling Toolkit (GMT), was introduced in August 1994 to address the high-level design phase. The GMT provides a powerful graphical-based modeling environment for creating, editing, analyzing and verifying GDMO object definitions.