NetCracker Wins UPC Broadband Vendor Award: Best Network System Supplier

Solution Accelerates Delivery of Complex Services and Increases Customer Satisfaction

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM — September 29, 2008 — NetCracker Technology will share insights gained from its outstanding track record of delivering Triple Play services to Cable Operators worldwide at Broadband World Forum Europe (September 29 – October 2).

NetCracker’s innovative cable solution accelerates the delivery of complex services and increases customer satisfaction through smart service and bandwidth management. NetCracker is the leading provider of OSS solutions for Cable, Mobile, and Fixed Service Providers — helping them achieve increased efficiencies and deliver innovative new services quickly.

“With Over the Top (OTT) content providers and peer-to-peer traffic fueling a demand for increased capacity, Cable Operators must ensure that their revenue gains exceed the cost of rolling out additional bandwidth,” said Andrew Feinberg, President and CEO of NetCracker Technology. “Using NetCracker’s innovative service management solution, cable companies have increased profitability, reduced cost of operations, and delivered a higher level of customer experience.”

The Cable Challenge
Cable Operators face unprecedented new business opportunities. Advances in technology have enabled them to transform into next-generation communications providers offering a vast array of content and services. With these exciting opportunities come challenges: operational challenges caused by interactive services, peer-to-peer traffic, and increased network complexity, as well as business challenges caused by demanding customers and competitive pressures.

To take advantage of new service opportunities and to remain competitive, Cable Operators must transform their operations environments into flexible, scalable, and agile engines. By doing so, they can accelerate the order-to-cash cycle and create the foundation for delivering and managing compelling new revenue-generating services.

Today’s communications world is complex and demands the rapid delivery of custom services over a wide range of Network and IT infrastructures. The cable challenge is to ensure that operations and IT systems can support rapid business growth. This requires significant infrastructure transformation to address the following:

• Systems Consolidation: MSOs must manage a wide range of business, operations, and IT systems acquired through mergers, acquisitions, and property consolidations. The resulting system silos are expensive to maintain, and the lack of integration precludes end-to-end service views.
• Lack of Automation: Many legacy cable systems were custom-built. Manual processes, and resulting high fallout rates, must be eliminated so new services can be provisioned rapidly and efficiently.
• Home Network and Device Management: Cable Operators must be able to provision, manage, and inter-work CPE, STBs, and the proliferating number of home networking devices.
• Service and Customer Experience Management: Competition has made service and customer experience management critical to success. Cable Operators must understand how their networks and services are behaving — but more importantly — how their customers are actually experiencing services.

Cable Operators who transform their OSS to overcome these challenges will distinguish themselves in an increasingly crowded market.

The NetCracker Solution
NetCracker Technology enables Cable Operators to deliver rapidly and manage effectively next-generation converged services. NetCracker is the global leader in managing and delivering transformation projects for Cable, Fixed, and Mobile Service Providers. It has the largest number of Tier 1 transformation deployments worldwide — including successful implementations at UPC Broadband, cablecom, France Telecom, MTS, Sprint, TELUS, and Telstra.

At UPC Broadband — the second largest cable operator in the world and the largest in Europe — NetCracker solutions have reduced operational costs associated with maintaining multiple legacy systems and achieved faster time to revenue from new services. Cablecom, a national subsidiary of UPC Broadband, has used NetCracker’s solutions to improve customer experience and loyalty through rapid order processing and managed Service Level Agreements. Recognizing the value of NetCracker’s cable solution, UPC recently presented NetCracker with the UPC Vendor Award for Best Network Systems Supplier.

NetCracker’s cable solution delivers the following benefits:

• End-to-end Visibility and Higher QoS through enhanced Service Management. These capabilities are essential in the Enterprise market.
• Home Network and Device Management through a single platform that manages both Network and IT domains
• Optimized Utilization of Shared Networks through enhanced capacity planning
• Ability to Analyze Planned and Unplanned Outages as well as What-If Scenarios through extensive modeling functionality
• Significant Increases in Upstream and Downstream Transmission Speeds and Support for IPv6 through rapid introduction of the DOCSIS 3.0 standard

NetCracker’s cable solution provides the following capabilities:

• Capacity Management: NetCracker’s capacity management and service inventory functionality enables end-to-end planning for Cable Operators that offer residential, business, and wireless services.
• Customer Impact Analysis: NetCracker’s Customer Impact Analysis module identifies the root causes of problems, as well as their impact on services and customers.
• Order Management: The Order Management module supports all business models that cable companies require. It captures and processes residential and business service orders in one system and also supports order management for wireless and other partner services.
• Data Center Inventory: The Data Center Inventory component provides efficient management of value-added cable services and content as well as IT resources.
• Business Activity Monitoring: The Business Activity Monitoring component allows Cable Operators to measure the efficiency of their fulfillment and infrastructure processes, reduce time-to-market, and improve the bottom line.

NetCracker’s ability to transform the Service Layer and manage Network and IT from a single platform allows Service Providers to speed the delivery of complex new services. Using NetCracker’s flexible and scalable solutions, leading Service Providers around the world have achieved rapid service delivery, created closer customer relationships, streamlined operations, and reduced service delivery costs.

Sanjay Mewada, NetCracker’s Vice President of Strategy, will be available to discuss the company’s cable solution at Broadband World Forum Europe from September 29 to October 2, 2008. Contact Juliet Shavit at jshavit@smartmarkusa.com to arrange a meeting.

About NetCracker Technology

NetCracker Technology is the leading global Solution Company enabling Service Providers to deliver rapidly and manage effectively convergent and content-rich offerings. NetCracker delivers service and resource management through its software and implementation expertise. NetCracker’s portfolio includes a comprehensive suite of product modules as well as specialized vertical solutions (such as Triple Play), all pre-integrated with the NetCracker Framework. Founded in 1993, NetCracker Technology was acquired by NEC Corporation in 2008. NetCracker Technology is headquartered in Waltham, MA, and can be reached at +1-781-419-3300 or www.NetCracker.com.