Today's service providers operate in a dynamic and challenging environment. Competition is fierce, margins are elusive, and the cost of innovation is high. Many service providers are looking to intelligent optical network technologies to pave their entry to new markets and reduce their operating costs. Network equipment manufacturers in turn are seeking ways to demonstrate the benefits of their technologies.

SP Guru Transport Planner is an advanced network planning solution that enables service providers and network equipment manufacturers to design resilient, cost-effective optical and SONET networks. Its unique multi-layered network presentation, broad technology support, and cutting edge optimization and design capabilities make SP Guru Transport Planner an invaluable resource for network architects and planners.

Figure 1. SP Guru Transport Planner automates optical network design and optimization

Return on Investment
OPNET's extensive, diverse customer base includes the leading providers of communications services and solutions from around the world. They realize significant return on investment from their use of OPNET software.

Generating Revenue:
	Service providers will obtain future revenues from new services, such as IP-over-optical, GigE-over-optical, and wavelength services. SP Guru Transport Planner automates the complex tasks associated with designing and analyzing these sophisticated networks. Using these same capabilities, network equipment manufacturers are able to demonstrate their solutions in a compelling way to prospective users.
Optimizing Capital Investments:
	The transport network often represents the most costly part of a service provider's infrastructure. SP Guru Transport Planner optimizes capital investments with automated cost analyses and cost-optimized designs. Because SP Guru Transport Planner understands legacy networks as well as new optical technologies, service providers are able to create migration and integration strategies that maximize the return on existing investments. Equipment providers benefit by rapidly demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of their solutions to their customers.
Reducing Operating Costs:
	Many service providers are implementing intelligent optical networks not only to enable new services, but also to reduce the cost of provisioning network changes. SP Guru Transport Planner facilitates provisioning by providing an integrated view of planned network changes at multiple layers, as well as detailed hardware cost and configuration information.
Reducing Risk:
	Lost service means lost revenue. SP Guru Transport Planner enables the service provider to reduce operational risk by calculating the probability of failures and estimating the associated revenue loss. Various protection scenarios can be analyzed to determine the optimal approach. SP Guru Transport Planner empowers the service provider to make informed business decisions about network investments required to meet service level commitments.

Optimizing Transport Networks
SP Guru Transport Planner's Virtual Network Environment enables "what if" analyses for a wide variety of optical network architectures, technologies, and configuration scenarios.