Cramer Systems is a British telecommunications firm, founded in 1996 by Jon Craton, Mark Farmer and Don Gibson. The firm developed

Operations support systems Operations support systems (OSS), operational support systems in British usage, or Operation System (OpS) in NTT, are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers to manage their networks (e.g., telephone networks). They support ...

(OSSs) for the

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

industry clients such as

Vodafone Vodafone Group plc () is a British multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates services in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. , Vod ...

, KPN Telecom, and British Telecom. In August 2006

Amdocs Amdocs ( he, אמדוקס) is a multinational corporation that was founded in Israel and currently headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri, with support and development centers located worldwide. The company specializes in software and services ...

announced the completion of the acquisition of the company. The products developed by Cramer have now been integrated into the

product suite. The company name is a combination of three letters from the names of Craton and Farmer.

Products

Former Westmoreland Road goods shed, from north-west

The company produced the Cramer OSS Suite, a set of applications built around Resource Manager, an inventory of a company's telecommunications network infrastructure and configuration. This includes equipment such as switches, routers,

Synchronous optical networking Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) are standardized protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diode ...

(SDH), and

Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy The plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH) is a technology used in telecommunications networks to transport large quantities of data over digital transport equipment such as fibre optic and microwave radio systems. The term '' plesiochronous'' i ...

(PDH) nodes, and

Customer-premises equipment In telecommunications, a customer-premises equipment or customer-provided equipment (CPE) is any terminal and associated equipment located at a subscriber's premises and connected with a carrier's telecommunication circuit at the demarcation po ...

(CPEs), but also cables, buildings, rooms, cabinets, and other such furniture. Originally developed to administer networks such as SDH and PDH, the product grew to encompass many modern telecommunications technologies. A key feature of the product was being 'service aware': not only knowing what equipment is installed, the system knows what each system, module, card, interface or cable can do, which circuits or connections are configured on the network and which customer services use these connections.{{Citation needed, date=December 2019 Additional modules grew to include: Task Engine, for complex "design and assign" task automation and basic workflow management; Delivery Engine, to manage complex change control (planning, plan execution including external workforce management system integration, reporting); Sync Engine, used to prevent mismatches between the information in the inventory system and the live network; Discovery Engine, to retrieve configuration information from network devices and element managers; Activation Engine, to provision network resources; Service Manager & Service Catalog, to take requests for services from a catalog, and convert them into requests in Delivery Engine and Task Engine; Route Finder, to identify physically redundant paths through the network; Class of Service manager, used to manage IP network policies; Site Manager, used to model and manage physical layout of exchanges, datacenters, their power and cooling; IT Manager, used to model services running on servers and virtual machines; Partition Manager, used to provide "multi-tenant" like data security; and numerous integration points to other OSS systems, such as Inventory Import/Export, FCAPS alarm enrichment, and others. The latest two versions of the OSS suite used

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

as middleware platform for the GUI and some interfaces or adapters between the suite and external systems.

Acquisition by Amdocs

Although Cramer was acquired by

in August 2006, the development of their products continues and is still based at their technology center in Bath,

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. The company continue to exist as the

operations support systems Operations support systems (OSS), operational support systems in British usage, or Operation System (OpS) in NTT, are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers to manage their networks (e.g., telephone networks). They support ...

(OSS) department of the much larger BSS developer Amdocs. Amdocs to Acquire Cramer
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External links

Amdocs OSS homepage

References

Software companies of the United Kingdom Network management British companies established in 1996 1996 establishments in England Amdocs