London, November 18th, 2009 - Today Ontology Systems announces that OSS/CAD, the groundbreaking application that uses ontologies to unify OSS/BSS and infrastructure, is integral to BT's successful IET Innovation Awards 2009 entry: Semantic Tool to Accelerate Migration of Telecommunications Products and Systems. The project has been selected as a finalist for the Telecommunications category of the IET Innovation Awards 2009.

The IET Innovation Awards celebrate the products, technologies and processes that lead the way in engineering innovation. The awards are judged by engineering experts and recognise the depth of innovative work being carried out across all areas of engineering and technology.

The BT award entry was based on the team's experiences of using OSS/CAD to discover and model dependencies among products, processes, systems, networks and customers. OSS/CAD then enables the understanding of the knock-on effect and impacts of product migration to conduct "what-if" scenario analysis and determine optimal order of migration steps.

John Wittgreffe, Chief Researcher, Corporate ICT Practice in BT commented: "The IET Innovation Awards are a great platform to showcase new and innovative technology that can impact business, and this finalist place shows both the ingenuity of OSS/CAD and the ability of BT Research & Technology to tackle such a complex problem in a new and exciting way."

Nektarios Georgalas , Principal Researcher, Corporate ICT Practice in BT added: "The objective of using OSS/CAD is to simplify the migration process, save money by minimising iterations and achieve the most accurate migration impact analysis. By using semantics to describe the full meaning of entities, OSS/CAD was able to provide more complete descriptions of product and system dependencies, thus reducing the number of iterative consultations with the experts."

Georgalas continued: "OSS/CAD is able to discover hidden dependencies, which would otherwise go missing. OSS/CAD can very flexibly support changes to the dependency model with minimal impact on the integrated data. It also provides advanced facilities to visualise dependencies, so decision makers can very easily run "what-if" migration scenarios and weigh their options forward."

Benedict Enweani, CEO, Ontology Systems concluded: "We are pleased that OSS/CAD is able to play such a key role in the BT project and that the overall innovation has been recognised by the IET. OSS/CAD is rapidly becoming a tool of choice for Telecom operators and service providers who need to better understand and manage their complex OSS/BSS infrastructures."

The IET Innovation Awards 2009 will take place on 25th November 2009 at the Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground, London. More information can be found at www.theiet.org/innovation