Product Description

Ontology Systems (now part of EXFO) develops a real time network and service topology platform and toolset that is used for service and customer assurance applications. It is also used as a source of data for active inventory systems to support visualization, troubleshooting, workflow and data alignment for NOC, SOC, and Care systems.

It uses a graph-data based approach, and a graph pattern matching inference/rules engine to discover or compute most of the relationships between data stored in the CSPs NMS/EMS, billing, assurance, fulfillment, and CRM systems to construct a mapping of tags, pointers, and relationships to accurately represent a service and its underlying virtual, logical and physical resources. Ontology is privately held with headquarters in the UK.
Ontology has three main competitors: Amdocs (Amdocs OSS), Netcracker (Operations Management) and Ericsson (Granite). However, Ontology is often used as an adjunct system to overlay these systems for data migration and reconciliation.

Ontology Systems’ products are based on its Ontology 5 graph-search, topology, data alignment and linking platform which uses new ways of representing and storing data to reduce the cost and risk associated with joining up data from multiple, misaligned sources and understanding its quality.

Ontology’s Intelligent 360 for Network Operators product line employs this capability to build a comprehensive end-to-end Dynamic Network and Service Topology Model and uses it to drive tools for Network Troubleshooting, Customer and Infrastructure Navigation and Change Management.