Broadband Services Inc. said Seren Innovations will apply BSI’s MapVantage platform and fiber management tools to the overbuilder’s broadband system operations.

During Phase I of the agreement, BSI collected and converted all data related to Seren’s St. Cloud, Minn. system to a standardized Geographic Information System (GIS) format, which assigns “intelligent attributes” to each symbol on the fiber portion of the map.

BSI is warehousing the data at its server facility, but enables authorized Seren employees to access the information via a secure Web-based application. BSI said it’s in the process of repeating that for Seren’s Concord, Calif., system.

For Phase II, BSI will assign symbols for the coax portion of both Seren systems.

BSI’s platform “provides a company-wide real-time view of an entire system, enabling Seren to identify new market opportunities and to pinpoint the operational needs — high-traffic areas, maintenance demands and system outages — that will help them provide the high reliability their customers expect,” said BSI Chief Technical Officer Andy Paff, in a release.

BSI and Seren are both participating in a recently-formed operator-vendor forum aimed at promoting the use of GIS for broadband engineering, and at creating baseline standards for the technology.