Comarch Supports Arqiva’s Development of Next Generation Smart Metering Services

Comarch and Arqiva have extended their commercial partnership as part of a long‐term plan to support the roll‐out of next generation smart meters in the UK. The two companies have agreed to work together for 15 years to increase the functionality of smart metering as it is rolled out to homes and businesses across the UK.

Comarch, a global supplier of software and services, provides the Operational Support System (OSS) and professional services that supports Arqiva’s smart metering platform, part of the UK Government’s Smart Metering Programme that will be delivered to 26 million homes in the UK by 2020.

Arqiva is the UK’s leading communications infrastructure and media services company. Its smart metering platform is used by the Data Communications Company (DCC), which manages the networks that will deliver the Government’s Smart Metering Programme. Arqiva is currently delivering the communications service needed to connect smart electricity and gas meters in around 10 million homes and businesses in the North of England and Scotland.

Comarch and Arqiva first started working together on the Smart Metering Programme in 2013. In this latest agreement, Comarch will provide software to increase Arqiva’s ability to monitor its Smart Metering Network. This will allow Arqiva to reduce operational expenditure, increase efficiencies and shorten the time it takes to deliver new services to customers on the platform.

Many different networks provide various services to Arqiva customers, and Comarch’s OSS Platform means that Arqiva can manage all of them from one place. It automates the provision of services to customers, which means Arqiva can process high volumes of orders and reduce the risk and impact of errors in service configuration. A single system for receiving and processing network alarms, and for monitoring the performance of the network vastly simplifies the process of managing it.

The full list of services that Comarch’s OSS platform provides to Arqiva is:

• Service Fulfilment – fulfilment automation to provision services on managed networks in an accurate and timely manner
• Network and Service Inventory – a single repository of physical and logical network resource and service information, to provide:
  • Network topology and service information to the Fault and Performance Management functions
  • Lifecycle management of network and service resources, supporting service fulfilment and plan and build activities
  • Capability to discover and reconcile network resources
• Fault Management – monitoring the network in real time to avoid or recover from any network failures
• Performance Management – monitoring the performance of the network and service in real‐time, to manage network capacity and service levels
• Configuration Management – backup, compare and restore configuration files from remote network devices
• Test & Diagnostics – a framework to test and verify the state of the network to ensure high quality service to customers
• B2B Interface – a capability‐based machine‐to‐machine interface for automating business interactions with wholesale partners or third party suppliers.

Richard Channell, Platform Development Director, Arqiva, says: “We’re delighted to have extended the partnership that we have had since 2013 in order to deliver excellent infrastructure to enable smart metering to be a reality for every home and business in the UK."

Oskar Wierchowicz, Director of Telecommunications Sector - UK, Comarch, says: “Our job is to help Arqiva simplify incredibly complex processes, to support scale and efficiency. We’ve designed our solution so that it can be applied to manage multiple networks and systems operated by Arqiva, and we will continue to do that for the next 15 years.”