PRODUCTS - Feature Story

Integration of GIS grouping and Report 'drill down' features with Performance Management

05.May.03-- Quantum Systems Integrators, Inc., aka QuantumSI, has completed and deployed a new feature set to QuantumSI's CROME product line. the Wireline and Wireless Performance Management (PM) Suite. The new features provide fully integrated GIS "polygon" grouping and display tools for iDEN, GSM and CDMA deployments.

A few of the many possible geo-coded groupings that have been created in CROME by customers include: zip, postal codes, political boundaries, special service areas, responsible engineer viewpoints.

QuantumSI's customers were "extremely impressed" to learn that any existing CROME report not created for use with GIS can now be "filtered" to any desired GIS area without any modifications, the exiting body of work basically inheriting new capabilities from this latest upgrade by QuantumSI.

In addition another "ease of use enhancement" is the addition of Report drill down features into the CROME product. Quantum's three "drill" modes allows engineers unprecedented navigational flexibility across any "reporting space".

About the new GIS "polygon" grouping features

The enhancements to Quantum products allow system administrators or occasional users such as RF engineers to quickly and easily geo code existing regions as a defined group (or set of groups). Once a region or set of regions are defined via Quantum geo-grouping tools they can immediately be applied as a filter to any existing CROME performance management report. As all CROME reports are live items thresholds can be adjusted and the displayed formula can be switched interactively.

CROME supplies both an interactive GIS editors in the end-user GUI to create, copy, and modify regions as well as import gateways to load "boundary" data from preexisting definitions such as shape files.

Unlike other solutions that rely on poorly integrated third party mapping products, the CROME implementation is tightly bound to the CROME DSS allowing interactive live analysis of any formula in any report in multiple display modes. For example CROME can report on one or more regions color coding numerical results in each region's polygon, and CROME can also report on and break out individual network elements in any arbitrary region based upon inclusion. End users can even "lasso" a group of sites on a map and instantly run reports against the included sites.

QuantumSI was able to design this feature set to work seamlessly with existing reports and better yet fully enable existing reports for GIS reporting that were designed before QuantumSI supported any GIS analysis whatsoever. The successful addition of previous GIS displays and now fully integrated GIS grouping and drill-downs to a legacy product line built in the 90's is a testament to the generic extensible design of QuantumSI products.

About the new Report 'drill down' features

Although the CROME system has always been able to analyze data in any "slice" by time range and/or hierarchical level and/or grouping. The addition of new "drill down", "drill-same" and "drill up" capability allows reports to be instantly run from items or groups of items in existing reports.

This capability enables the engineer searching for issues to quickly uncover problems and analyze related elements for the same issue or variance. The "drill down" capability works in three distinct modes (all of which instantly run new reports at different hierarchical focus or element groupings):

The "drill up" mode which takes into account "parents" of the selected network element(s) and shifts the hierarchical view to the parent level selected.

The "drill same" mode which takes into account "peers" of the selected network element(s) and leaves the hierarchical view at the same level as the given report.

The "drill down" mode which takes into account "children" of the selected network element(s) and shifts the hierarchical view to the child level selected.

Quantum's three "drill" modes allows engineers to navigate the reporting space to solve problems faster and proactively keep your operations running at maximum efficiency thus decreasing downtimes and/or customer impacting conditions caused by a dynamic environment faced by many operators.

Note as shown above in the first two examples, an item can be "drilled" by simply right-mouse clicking its location on a graph or by right-mouse clicking its line in the grid. Or, as in the third example above, any number of items can be "grouped" together (using the Shift or Ctrl key in the same manner as normal Microsoft applications) and then the "drill" will take place on the selected items.

Total System Flexibility

Most tool suites are designed for one particular task, in contrast to the traditional software design philosophy, QuantumSI values generic extensible code from which our customers gain enormous benefit.

With this in mind QuantumSI challenges potential customers to ask themselves (and other venders) some serious questions about regarding the flexibility of their Performance Management (PM) solutions :

  • Can your PM tool analyze different technologies such as iDEN, GSM, wireless and wireline data from different switches and vendors in the same application - is it flexible enough to quickly add support for new data sets (i.e. new elements for new services ) ?

  • Can your PM tool process thousands of sectors (or trunks, etc.) per second in a full ad-hoc reporting mode?

  • Can your PM tool support anyone in the enterprise using only a common web browser like IE and Netscape on platforms ranging from PCs to Unix/Linux workstations?

  • Can your PM tool run with different software revisions and mismatched data sets coming from the myriad of network elements in a national infrastructure?

  • Can your PM tool scale from a market to a nation without losing performance and becoming sluggish?

  • Was your PM solution designed from the ground up to be fault tolerant?

  • Is your PM tool flexible enough to analyze other data for example billing data i.e. mining CDR records and even drive test data i.e. taking a single mobile phone across time and displaying statistical information in an interactive GIS display as it moved?

  • Can your PM tool match CROME's proven near-term and long-term capabilities, CROME not only processes data in real-time but also stores enough data online to perform historical trend analysis via ad-hoc reporting across 5, 10 and even 15 years.
QuantumSI's CROME solution easily meet the challenges set forth above. It is no small wonder that our competitors have been attempting to copy QuantumSI products for years (using our product as the "gold" standard) in an attempt to emulate CROME's technology, feature sets, high level of integration, and ease of use.

About CROME

The CROME software suite is a best in its class decision support system that allows both land-line and wireless service providers to quickly analyze capacity, trends and faults for any network. This allows wireless providers to proactively tune, adjust, reassign, or increase capacity to meet exacting quality of service levels at the lowest possible equipment expenditure rate.

CROME is a generic full ad-hoc reporting system which is implemented in the JAVA programming language, there is no need for end users to write code or develop additional modules to enhance or expand the system.

Statistical data flows are captured in real-time from a multitude of network elements and the data is immediately presented to end-users via a 100% pure Java(tm) reporting tool that runs on both standard PCs and Sun Workstations.

The use of integrated GIS features and multidimensional reporting along with built in high Erlang-B and Erlang-C functions has proven to be invaluable to Quantum's customers.

In addition since Quantum's CROME product is a national multi-vendor and multi-switch PM solution, thus with any revision for any vendor's switch or equipment the CROME system transparently combines data from multiple switch types across multiple vendor revisions (i.e. input data) into a single unified regional or national report for any combination of switches and/or sub-elements across any time range or focus via lightning fast full on demand ad-hoc reporting.