Cramer Systems, founded in 1996 by Jon Craton, Mark Farmer and Don Gibson, developed OSS systems for the telecommunication industry. In August 2006 Amdocs announced the completion of the acquisition of the company. The products developed by Cramer are now an integral part of the Amdocs product suite. The company name is a combination of three letters from the names of Craton and Farmer, which they found to be a better option than the alternative combination of Farton.
Products
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 like switches, routers, SDH and PDH nodes, CPEs etc., but also things like cables, buildings, rooms, cabinets etc. Originally developed to administer networks such as SDH and PDH, the product grew to encompass almost all 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. 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 ; 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, etc. The latest two versions of the OSS suite uses Java as middleware platform for the GUI and some interfaces or adapters between the suite and external systems.
Acquisition by Amdocs
Although Cramer has been acquired by Amdocs in August 2006 the development of their products continues and is still based at their technology center in Bath, England. They continue to exist, but now as the OSS department of the much larger BSS developer Amdocs.
