What is Alvatross?

Alvatross is committed to standardise and simplify everything so our clients can be ready for future upgrades. Hence, the value of the platform that our company offers is that we follow the TM Forum philosophy to streamline processes. If we compare our solution to other monolithic solution stacks, we can see our product tends to be much easier to scale. This is because our solution consists of some sort of Lego blocks that are easily integrated and adaptable.

These Lego blocks enable adding new functionalities, services, or products without disturbing the previously existing ones. The main benefit of this will be our customer’s Time-to-Market. The time it takes to reengineer parts of a solution, and the time it takes to make an add-on is dramatically different. That is where the real speed takes place.

Moreover, reengineering comes with other challenges and possible negative impacts. If your company decides to go this way, you will not only be slower but also will be at risk of affecting your system. Potentially, you will affect the way you provision your old customers. Even their user experience could be at risk. On the contrary, by only adding on new functionalities, we will reduce the time needed for your Time-to-Market goals. Consequently, we will also limit the risk of making manual mistakes in the new provisioning flow defined to provision a new service. Therefore, the impact is significantly lower.

In short, what is the real benefit for our customers? The main one is that the delivery time will be reduced if compared to other solutions. Also, thanks to these Lego blocks, our customers can easily adapt our solution to other previous or future updates. If our customers find, for instance, a service inventory that suits their business model better, they will be able to easily exchange it in the future. Of course, the only condition is that the new one also complies with the same standards. But, in any case, the solution will continue to work without issues.

So, you may probably agree with us: Alvatross can become truly beneficial for your company when used correctly. Tackling evolution with agility, being prepared to scale your systems and becoming ready for the future should be key in your business strategy. The future is now, and companies are still on time to be ready and more agile thanks to Alvatross’ OSS solutions.

We’ve heard that question before and the answer is simple: it is fully customisable. Its main mission is to manage relationships with entities of the customer domain. Therefore, it needs certain flexibility to be able to design, create, augment, and map new entities and their supporting data.

This Unified Catalog allows service catalog entities to be created, configured, or modified. You can set both product specification services and resource specifications. Yet, if our customers wish to do so, these features can also be used in read-only mode.

Moreover, since all of these are microservices within our architecture and we work with Open APIs, we can connect to any other service. For instance, let’s say we need to read information about offers from an external system. To do so, we can access this third-party system through Open APIs. If the company does not use Open APIs, we can still create an Open API gateway which works as a bridge to communicate both systems. In different words, no matter the starting point of our customer, we can perfectly make this catalog work one way or another.

Obviously, it would mean a lot of time and effort to start every project from scratch. To prevent this, we use templates for all Resource Facing Services. Our RFS are the Lego building blocks of the whole catalog configuration. Using these RFS as a basis, our clients can build and create new Customer Facing Services, products, offers, etc.

On the other hand, this catalog allows to maintain all these service characteristic templates. Both, Customer and Resource Facing Service specifications can be created, modified, and managed on this application. Moreover, we also count on a library of processes for fulfilment workflows which serves as a model we can build on, rely on, modify, or readjust depending on the new specifications.

Therefore, this Unified Catalog is not a clean slate we start building from scratch every single time. Instead, it functions as a fully customisable application with templates to build the specific service catalog entities that our customers need.

The answer is complex and may vary. The only possibility to make accurate time estimations would be by depicting specific cases or scenarios. The following article will provide you with information about three common scenarios:

How much time does it take to implement Alvatross’ OSS solution?

Our solution has been built as a catalog-driven and service-agnostic OSS system to automate service fulfilment. This way, we can enable:

• Robust product and service characteristic propagation from products to service activation parameters.
• Provisioning order decomposition and execution plan.

Its flexible suite of Open APIs and the powerful end-to-end integration simplify the definition of new products and offers based on current technologies, new technologies and third-party vendors. With alvatross’ solutions our clients can continuously innovate to provide products and services to customers and business. In other words, we can speed up the traditional Time-to-Market of new products and campaigns. It enables new services to be quickly added with moderate integration efforts and without affecting legacy systems and services.

We have heard this question on many different occasions and the answer is very straightforward. The first thing you need to know is that this is not a very big issue or something we haven’t planned beforehand. Obviously, the ideal scenario regarding times and costs would be to already use Open APIs. Yet, if, for any reason, your company still doesn’t use them or is not planning to implement this kind of interface, we can create adaptations and connectors through Open API gateways.

Alvatross has proven record of being able to drastically reduce the overall operational costs and back-office intervention of our clients. The main key functionalities and tools to be able to do so are:

• Provisioning orchestration: The order management, activation engine and fallout management modules enable companies to automate E2E service fulfilment processes, while identifying and monitoring any problem detected during provisioning processes in real time. Moreover, this automation can also prevent manual errors and delays.
• Our Service Inventory: This is because it works as a master source of customer service instances.
• Full process automation integration: It reduces both provisioning time and provisioning breaks.
• Task centralization: With one single system we can prevent our customers from constantly needing to switch between different tools, with different functionalities from different vendors.
• The user-friendly nature of our applications: All our tools have been designed always keeping our customers in mind. Therefore, regardless of the technical skills of the person who needs to work with our interfaces, they will surely be able to adapt and learn how to use the new systems relatively quickly.

Our customer-centric approach revolves around the idea of providing and automated end-to-end solution to eliminate manual tasks which normally lead to data integrity issues. Our Order Management and fulfilment capabilities fully depend on our customer and its capacity to integrate a complete OSS solution (with either all the products of our suite or just part of them).

This allows for a completely automated order-to-payment process which reduces both the errors and time needed to run provisioning processes. Furthermore, we integrate a fallout management module to speed the fallout management process. As a result, we can create higher levels of customer satisfaction in terms of service provisioning, data integrity and service quality in general.

Our experience tells us that customer centricity is a must. Therefore, we implement different methodologies in the way we operate our business to make our tool as user-friendly as possible. Our customers are normally very diverse, with very different requests and ways of working. Even more so, the buyer persona of our customers is normally very specific and therefore our solution needs to be flexible and customisable because one size does not fit all.

If you want to know more about the user-friendly nature of our applications and how we make sure our customers can quickly learn how to use them click on the following link:

Is customer centricity a hype of the moment or a real necessity?

The solutions offered by Alvatross allow us to deploy our services either on-premises or in the cloud. One of the core principles of our architecture is avoiding customer "lock-in" situations: vendor lock-in, database lock-in, or cloud lock-in. Our solutions are built as cloud-native so we can benefit from its main traits: scalability, elasticity, resiliency, and, most importantly, flexibility.

Alvatross’ Digital platform cloud-native architecture includes microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and APIs. In line with this architecture, we use techniques like DevOps and agile methodology to leverage the architecture and deliver value to our customers faster.

Also, we have evolved to become DDBB agnostic, giving alvatross’ Digital platform the ability to store data in any of the main relational databases available in any cloud. Our customers can either leverage their existing database on-premise licenses or use any cloud database managed service. This way we can accelerate our deployments while reducing costs.

In 2021, alvatross became a DDBB-agnostic platform. Therefore, our Digital platform can noe be used in any different environment. Data can be collected and sourced from heterogeneous databases, which are now irrelevant to our platform. Therefore, our clients can decide which database they would like to use without having to worry.

Nowadays we support:

• PostgreSQL > 13.3
• MySQL > 8.0.25
• MariaDB > 10.5.10
• SQL Server > 2019
• Oracle > 12G

Alvatross’ Activation Engine provides a connector library for the most common protocols and network elements, including a framework to allow technical users to seamlessly create new connectors.

If you want to know the exact connectors we have in our library, please, feel free to contact us any time.