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Dan Druta an architect with “Cingular,
now the new at&t” was in
great demand because of his honest
assessments and practiced eye for
detail. - He appeared on 3 panels.
He found that internal turf battles
still hold back OSS modernization.
He sees vendors in denial that OSS & BSS
is becoming a commodity. Druta kept
returning to the basic truth that it
is the customer, stupid. OSS & BSS
must be re-conceptualized and redesigned
from the perspective of the end consumer
of services and must cease being
a utility for the operations and
accountants of the company. This
is the design lesson of web services
and his vision for future OSS.
Lessons learned
On
the side of light, some simple messages
did get delivered. AMDOCs and Telecom
Italia saw integration as event-driven
and not, as was viewed in the past,
data-driven. Vodafone laid it all
out so simply to its fellow service
providers, “If
you do not know your processes, you
do not know your business.” Suresh
Bhandarkar of Tech Mahindra described
OSS delivery as “Expose = create
services; Compose = aggregate services
with processes; Consume = deploy
in bundled units”. We were
reminded that events have a finite
life-cycle and can have different
uses and even meanings in different
contexts. Clint Heckel of Verizon
Business praised use of the SID and
TAM as a way of providing and enforcing
IT design standards on the many diverse
teams that are occupied within large
projects. And the TMF is promising
fresh tools with the forthcoming
Telecommunications Application Map
(TAM) Release 2.
But the darker side of the conference
showed that the lessons and designs
of NGOSS are not universal. The most
general mistake of the majority of
presenters was in equating Architecture with Interface
Design. Some presenters used
the NGOSS terms, but had not read
the documents; for example calling
the SID data-model an interface design.
Another malapropism was in calling
SOA a “philosophy” which
so incensed the esteemed Ziaur Rahman
of T-Mobile that he responded by
recapping the history of Information
Technology from machine language
to modern times with side branches
into epistemology and modern physics.
Another problem was in vendors continuing
to display the overall OSS/BSS architecture
as a TMN inspired pyramid. But worst
was the surprise expressed that
tomorrow’s systems must handle
petabytes of data. So there is still
work to be done.
Service providers were open about
their needs. Dan Druta finds that
most operating effort is wasted in
today’s OSS & BSS – his
operations team must work so hard
because his systems are so inefficient.
Massimo Albani
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“OSS & BSS must be re-conceptualized
and redesigned from the perspective
of the end consumer of services and
must cease being a utility for the
operations and accountants of the
company.” |
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of Telecom Italia found
security sorely missing
from OSS/BSS designs. Willy
Siebert wants his vendors,
current and prospective,
to hear the message on
what operators really want
and need. He still finds
this an uphill battle.
Fabrice Libon of Sprint
Nextel wants a “data-orientated
mediation layer where the
business units, and not
the vendors and IT, own
the data.” And Clint
Heckel wants more reusable
web service solutions.
Dr. Lorien Pratt is capturing
these needs and trends
in a comprehensive study
of data needs and uses
in OSS/BSS.
Next Years…
But what of the
future? Where is the next generation,
the next 10 years from
now, headed? LTC International
sponsored a survey to which
60 participants contributed.
Respondents, grouped as
service providers, OSS/BSS
vendors, or Integrators,
were asked their views
of two forward looking
technologies: SOA & IMS.
The responses, compiled
by Peter Gilligan of LTC,
should point the direction
to next years Next Gen
OSS conference. Vendors
see SOA as driving down
OSS/BSS costs. Service
providers see SOA as enabling
significant improvements
in OSS/BSS performance.
Both acknowledge this leads
to new opportunities for
service providers, but
vendors and integrators
see service providers as
the main beneficiary of
SOA technology. A similar
trend was seen with IMS.
Service providers are quite
optimistic that IMS will
lead to new revenues; large
service provides especially
so. All three groups believed
that IMS will reduce service
provider’s costs
and vendors felt that IMS
will lend a degree of protection
to service provider business
models. Network equipment
vendors, who supply the
IMS technology today, are
expected to profit from
IMS as well.
For some participants,
the need for better systems
design and deployments
was presaged by the operational
software failure of their
airline as they were traveling
to the conference – where
the planes flew, but not
the passengers. Once everyone
got to Boston, the message
unreeled: Ziaur Rahman
said it softly but emphatically, “SOA
will lead to profound changes.”
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