Cramer Systems is a British telecommunications firm, founded in 1996 by Jon Craton, Mark Farmer and Don Gibson. The firm developed
Operations support systems (OSSs) for the
telecommunication industry clients such as
Vodafone,
KPN Telecom, and
British Telecom
BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...
. In August 2006
Amdocs announced the completion of the acquisition of the company. The products developed by Cramer have now been integrated into the
Amdocs product suite. The company name is a combination of three letters from the names of Craton and Farmer.
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 such as switches,
routers,
Synchronous optical networking (SDH), and
Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) nodes, and
Customer-premises equipment (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 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
Amdocs in August 2006, the development of their products continues and is still based at their technology center in
Bath
Bath may refer to:
* Bathing, immersion in a fluid
** Bathtub, a large open container for water, in which a person may wash their body
** Public bathing, a public place where people bathe
* Thermae, ancient Roman public bathing facilities
Plac ...
,
England. The company continue to exist as the
operations support systems (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