AG Communication Systems' local number portability to use ISR Global Telecom's ToolKit

Business Wire, May 29, 1997

MAITLAND, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 29, 1997--ISR Global Telecom announced Thursday that AG Communication Systems has purchased ISR's Orbit(tm) TMN (Telecommunications Management Network) ToolKit to build both the Local Service Management System (LSMS) and Service Order Activation (SOA) application product for Local Number Portability (LNP).

LNP enables customers to change their geographic location, or service provider for local telephone service, without changing their phone number.

In research tests at ISR, a single engineer using ISR's Orbit ToolKit compiled the Local Number Portability Management Information Base (MIB) and developed a prototype application in less than three days. It would normally take three weeks and three engineers to develop this prototype. With Orbit's unique object-oriented TMN modeling capability, a developer can prototype and build management applications rapidly -- without extensive TMN expertise.

"After a thorough evaluation of the industry's popular toolkits, we chose Orbit because we found productivity to be higher, and we were able to significantly reduce our product development calendar interval. While productivity improvements clearly make our organization more efficient, the cycle time reduction is critical to enable us to meet the time-to-market intervals which the market demands," said David Strand, architecture leader, Product Development, AG Communication Systems.

"Orbit is well suited to meeting the requirements of Local Number Portability and we are very excited to partner with AG Communication Systems," said Steve Barnhart, vice president of Sales & Marketing, ISR Global Telecom. "This is an opportunity for us to enter one of the hottest markets in the industry with a solid supplier of telecommunications technologies."

Orbit completed its Beta trials with eight selected industry leaders in November 1996 and is now commercially available. During the beta test, when compared to other TMN products, Orbit came out ahead of the competition in several areas, such as being the only product with seamless persistence support using an Object-Oriented Data Base Management System (OODBMS), automatically generated Dynamic Forms for instant provisioning, and powerful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that produce self-documenting code.

AG Communication Systems (http://www.agcs.com) is a leading developer and manufacturer of advanced telecommunication products and services, including access, wireless and intelligent network products. AG Communication Systems' GTD-5 digital switching systems serve more than 17 million customers worldwide in business, industry and government, as well as subscribers serviced by the public telephone network. The 100-year-old company had more than $300 million in sales in 1996.

ISR Global Telecom is an industry leader in the design and development of standards-based TMN solutions. By understanding the challenges of managing today's increasingly complex and diverse networks, ISR took a fresh approach to network management and built a system based on the strengths of object-oriented technology and TMN principles. ISR provides its customers with real-world solutions to managing multi-vendor networks in the areas of ATM, Hybrid Fiber Coax, PCS, SDH/SONET, and WLL. ISR Global Telecom can be reached on the web at http://www@isrglobal.com . ISR will be at SuperComm '97 (Booth No. 3933). -0-

NOTE TO EDITORS: In the Internet/email address noted in this news release, there is an "at" symbol between jim and isrglobal.com.

In the World Wide Web addresses noted in this news release, there is a double slash between http: and www.agcs.com, and between http: and www and an "at" symbol between www and isrglobal.com. These symbols may not appear properly in some systems.

CONTACT: ISR Global Telecom Inc., Maitland

Jim Agnello, 407/875-3600, ext. 251

jim@isrglobal.com