PITTSBURGH - Edge router newcomer Laurel Networks last week entered the profitable-service/demand-creation plan market with a program designed to chart the feasibility of carrier technology upgrades.

The 3-year-old company unveiled FirstSTEP, a "strategic technology evolution" program providing financial analysis, back-office integration, and device and network validation tools to guide carriers through a technology overhaul at the edge of their networks. The goal of the overhaul is to replace legacy gear with systems - Laurel's ST200 routers - that support packet-based multiservice networking capabilities.

FirstSTEP comes after programs that Cisco and Juniper released to direct carriers through a technology migration that would result in profitable rollout of new services and increased sales of Cisco and Juniper products.

Cisco has been enticing carriers to move from a commodity transport to a value-added services and applications business model, and encouraging cable multisystem operators to encroach on carriers' revenue streams, thereby creating competition and demand for Cisco products. Cisco also has described architectural frameworks - one such framework is called Broadband Local Integrated Services Solution (BLISS) - designed to convince service providers that they can roll out profitable new services by augmenting existing circuit, packet and cable infrastructures with new purchase orders for Cisco products (see story).

Not to be outdone on the conceptual framework front, Juniper announced its own profitability/sales-generation plan called Model for Integrated Network Transformation (MINT). MINT proposes a model whereby service providers generate profit through service customization and added value as they scale their services - through purchase and installation of Juniper products - to address untapped or underserved markets. (see story).

Now it's Laurel's turn. FirstSTEP is more tangible than BLISS or MINT because it proposes establishing quantifiable and qualitative test scenarios for new technology and service rollouts, rather than concepts.

"It's simpler to grasp," says Mark Bieberich, an analyst at The Yankee Group. "It focuses on four very tangible aspects of the product's [proposal], whereas the other programs seem to incorporate quite a few more aspects of the overall solution."