NSO has unique features to ensure shorter time-to-market and lower cost of ownership than any other service activation tools on the market.
There are several stove-pipe activation tools (single-vendor, single service-type) that work very well for that specific vendor or service type. Service activation with these tools breaks down when a service requires different vendors or multiple service types. NSO is capable of handling multiple service types for multi-vendor networks.
NSO is unique in the way it communicates to the devices. Many activation tools require device “adaptors” that are custom-coded and expensive to maintain. The NSO Network Element Driver (NED) technology makes device integration simple.
Another difference is that NSO applies transactions to the activation chain. Many other activation tools are workflow-centric, which makes it very hard to recover from faults and in many cases they escape to manual work orders.
NSO also provides detailed knowledge of the device configurations: it can make sure that the service instance is consistent with the actual device configuration. NSO provides a network and service CLI as a powertool for network engineers. The visibility of the activation chain, using the CLI, service dry-run, etc, helps the network engineers trust the tool (this is harder to do with tools that just provides a magic OK button).
