Connexion Technologies selects Corticon's business rules for FTTH deployments

OCTOBER 23, 2007 By Meghan Fuller -- Connexion Technologies Inc. (search for Connexion Technologies), has selected Corticon Technologies, provider of model-driven business rules management systems, to help it with the complex task of planning, installing, and managing FTTH (search for FTTH) networks.

Connexion Technologies works with developers, builders, owners, and operators to design, build, and maintain fiber networks in single family, multi-family, high-rise, hospitality, and resort communities in the U.S. The company says its customer list already numbers 170 communities and counting.

That said, FTTH installation and management is a competitive business, and companies like Connexion Technologies need to leverage any way to differentiate itself from the traditional telephone companies, says Andrei Mitran, Connexion's vice president of systems development. There is, as he puts it, "a sequence of events, an orchestration of people, and a lot of dependencies. It's not as simple as 'Dig the hole. Put the fiber in the hole,'" he admits.

Enter Corticon Technologies and its Business Rules Management System, a generic tool that gives businesses the ability to model and automate recurring decisions. Connexion is using the tool to more efficiently schedule and dispatch its installation and maintenance crews.

"We wanted be able to schedule to a timeframe," Mitran recalls, "so we're doing things like keeping track of who the technicians are, how many hours they are available, what shifts they're on, what their skills are, what kind of problems they know and do not know how to fix. We're trying to do some skills-based routing so we can more efficiently go out and fix problems in a timely manner."

By streamlining the installation process and automating product and service dependencies, inter-dependencies, escalation procedures, and ticket management status changes, Connexion Technologies says it expects to:

• Reduce the costs of installing a fiber connection to every home in the community;
• Gain flexibility and agility to deliver products and services offerings to meet market demand;
• Tighten management of field operations; and
• Consistently manage contractual obligations to both service providers and communities.

Mitran says Connexion's decision to use the business rules has already paid dividends. "We're the second largest FTTH provider in the country right now, and we've only got about five or six full-time, hardcore technical programmers working on our systems," he reports. "If you look at anyone else in the business, I will guarantee that the number of people they have is at least ten times that amount to solve the problems that we are solving."

David Straus, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Corticon, says his company's business rules differ from competitors' offerings because the rules are organized in a spreadsheet-like format, allowing complete visibility to the supervisor, field technician, and anyone else who may want to access them. Competitors' offerings are often visible only to the programmer who programmed the rules, he says, and there is no way for the user to verify the accuracy of these rules or alter them to satisfy changing needs.

"Say next week, some new regulation comes out," muses Straus. "All the sudden, the rules change, and Connexion has to deploy people in a different way, or change the order [of its installation and maintenance procedures], or add a whole new set of steps. In a classic programming environment, a new spec could take weeks or months."

Using Corticon's business rules, by contrast, Connexion can model new rules, test them, and deploy them in a matter of hours or days, says Straus. "Now [Connexion's] business can actually be more agile and [the company] can both respond to competitive threats or create competitive advantage faster than other people who are either using manual decision making or classic programming techniques."

Mitran confirms that Connexion plans to reach more than 110 additional residential communities this year. "As we continue to grow and expand," he says, "we will continue to use Corticon Business Rules Management System to build and reuse corporate assets across the enterprise, to give consistency and accuracy in our day-to-day business activities, and, ultimately, to provide our customers with premier customer service."

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