NetCracker announces its enhanced IPTV service delivery solution at IPTV World Forum North America. NetCracker’s IPTV solution, combined with its Services Ecosystem approach, enables CSPs to meet IPTV’s scalability, infrastructure diversity, and offer management challenges.

To support the diversity of services and devices required by IPTV and to realize the promise of high-quality, user-controlled entertainment, information, and communications, CSPs must address fundamental fulfillment, assurance, and content management issues. NetCracker’s enhanced IPTV solution gives CSPs proven techniques to manage those issues.

• Fulfillment: The solution addresses the need to manage CPE diversity, home network provisioning, just-in-time fulfillment, and the use of TV as an ordering portal.
• Assurance: The solution maps services to performance and fault management data, provides an understanding of service dependencies, and delivers end-to-end assurance.
• Content and Partner Management: The solution enables the centralized management of content catalogs that contain rule-based offerings to support a range of technical and regulatory parameters. It also enables the centralized management of customer offers and correlation between customer profiles.

NetCracker introduced its Triple Play Industry Solution in May 2007 — including the first version of its IPTV solution — and has deployed it at leading Tier 1 CSPs worldwide. From its Triple Play deployments, NetCracker has developed a deep understanding of the challenges that CSPs face implementing IPTV — as well as proven techniques for overcoming them.

From its Tier 1 deployments, NetCracker has identified the following core service delivery issues that CSPs must address to be successful in mass market IPTV rollouts:

• Managing diverse content from multiple providers
• Delivering on-demand, interactive services
• Managing and measuring the customer experience across complex service offerings
• Managing efficiently a large-scale infrastructure that reaches directly into end users’ homes

Only by addressing these issues can CSPs fulfill the promise of IPTV.

"With the combination of fulfillment, assurance, content, and partner management, NetCracker's IPTV solution takes a holistic approach that helps Service Providers focus on the attributes that drive customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention," said Elisabeth Rainge, IDC’s Director of Network Software. “NetCracker’s ability to manage Network and IT resources from a single platform, their highly successful OSS transformation projects, and their new focus on creating a Services Ecosystem have made them market leaders.”

Sanjay Mewada, NetCracker’s Vice President of Strategy, will discuss service delivery challenges faced by CSPs, NetCracker’s enhanced IPTV solution, and deployment case studies in a keynote address at IPTV World Forum North America being held at McCormick Place, Chicago, July 22–23, 2008.

“The complex IPTV service delivery challenges faced by CSPs require an innovative, scalable solution like NetCracker’s,” said Sanjay. “Our enhanced IPTV solution has reduced service delivery time, reduced operations costs, and increased customer satisfaction — demonstrating NetCracker’s ongoing commitment to the needs of its customers.”