ComputerWorld 2002

This Article first appeared in 19-25 April 2002 COMPUTERWORLD

ComputerWorld, Apr 19, 2002--When three colleagues in Intel saw the opportunity to address what they called a "problem statement" in the telecom industry, they decided to pursue their dreams that resulted in the founding of Telogic, a telecommunication solutions provider. "We all share the same ambition to be our own bosses," said Alex Tok, one of Telogic's three cofounders and also the company's business development director. "The entrepreneurial spirit was kicking within us, and since we had this opportunity, we grabbed it. The "opportunity" was the fact that in the course of meeting up with various service operators, the founders noticed that these telcos needed to better understand their network performance, and needed access to real time data. "All these were lacking in their current systems," said Low Kim Seng, another cofounder and sales director for Telogic. "Sure, there were other available solutions around, but they tended to be more expensive and less flexible." As a result, Low, Tok and Ang See Lin, the third cofounder and also the company's technical director, decided to build their own solution which would provide better value ? be cost effective as well as have a better understanding of Asia Pacific requirements. "While there were western players like Agilent, there was no local entity that could customize the solution according to local needs," said Low.

Product fruition
After about three years of non-commercial development, the effort has culminated in UniSS7, a telecommunications network management system, which they have since commercialized after incorporating the company in January this year. UniSS7 comprises a signaling monitoring system that allows extraction of valuable realtime information from wireline or wireless networks based on Signaling System 7 (SS7). SS7 is the signaling protocol used in the public switched telephone network for communications between network points. By using non-intrusive probes, UniSS7 allows the user to capture and analyze all messages flowing on the SS7 network. Service providers can then extract and exploit the relevant information to improve the efficiency of their networks, boost profitability, and increase customer satisfaction. "There are various modules like quality of service and service level agreement to measure performance between network points," said Tok. According to Telogic, the information gleaned is suitable for use in a variety of applications like traffic engineering, network planning, interconnections arbitration, fraud management, location based services, and even roaming services. However, developing UniSS7 was not without its challenges. With the high cost of personnel in Singapore, the founders decided to outsource coding to Thailand and Indonesia in order to keep costs down. "While many think that India is the place to go to for offshore software development, you will be surprised how good programmers in Thailand and Indonesia are," said Low. "Only the specification and design was done in Singapore."

Test drive
Another huge challenge was testing the product. "We don't get access to networks all the time," said Tok. "We capture the trace whenever possible and work closely with the telcos which believe in us. One such telco was PT Indosat, an Indonesian operator that is currently using UniSS7. Telogic also original equipment manufactures (OEMs) its software through Unified Communications, which does network performance management. Telogic's other products include a USSD gateway and a Location Based Services Gateway both of which are designed to help operators address their network management issues as well as providing enhanced services. "Moving forward, we aim to build Product fruition
After about three years of non-commercial development, the effort has culminated in UniSS7, a telecommunications network management system, which they have since commercialized after incorporating the company in January this year. UniSS7 comprises a signaling monitoring system that allows extraction of valuable realtime information from wireline or wireless networks based on Signaling System 7 (SS7). SS7 is the signaling protocol used in the public switched telephone network for communications between network points. By using non/intrusive probes, UniSS7 allows the user to capture and analyze all messages flowing on the SS7 network. Service providers can then extract and exploit the relevant information to improve the efficiency of their networks, boost profitability, and increase customer satisfaction.