Is OSS Worth its Weight? (cont'd)

Why Don't Executives Get It?
The mindset that overlooks operational cost is rooted in the rate-of-return regulation days. Cost was rolled into pricing, so inefficiency was never a concern. Some believe the current generation of RBOC management is so set in this mindset that it isn’t sophisticated enough to understand its own business problems. “You’re dealing with executive management staff that came to work for these companies out of high school and spent years inside the Bells before they went back for a degree,” says a former SBC employee-turned-strategic consultant. This is a harsh indictment, but if a monopoly mindset doesn’t change then it “may be a matter of a generation turning over to move [the Bell-era] mindset out,” says AceComm’s Jimenez.

Vendors, on the contrary, are sometimes so caught up in their software that they fail to address real problems. “Sometimes vendors forget that you're not going to rip all the systems apart to put in a new one,” says Behzad Nadji, vice president and head of enterprise architecture for network, OSS and ITS for AT&T. He says many OSS products are still designed for greenfield environments. As a result, they don't de-couple into components easily enough to fix the specific, between-the-cracks problems most large telcos face.

Some executives and managers will not listen to an OSS value proposition because previous vendors have promised too much and delivered too little. “There's been a fairly chronic lack of delivery, so there are twice bitten-thrice shy guys out there that bought a story and after the honeymoon realized they weren't a whole lot better off than they'd been with previous suppliers,” says Andrew Hurrell, vice president of marketing for Atreus Systems, a provider of IP-service creation solutions.

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The Integration Tax Looms
Perhaps the biggest threat to the OSS value proposition is the integration tax. There’s no way around systems integration costs in any OSS project, because no OSS stands alone. “OSS is not about a single application…you can have a stove, an oven, or a refrigerator, but without them all you can’t really cook,” says Kimber Lewis, strategic consultant and former GTE and OSS vendor executive. The problem is that the cost to cook dinner – that of integration - is significantly higher than the cost of the OSS ingredients. “When you consider the amount of money a carrier spends on OSS, 200 percent of it is spent on integration. That problem needs to be solved,” says AT&T’s Nadji.

Nadji argues that for carriers to accept a common value proposition for OSS , the economics of integration have to change and OSS developers must bring plug-and-play closer to reality. “I think the hardware industry got this down perfectly…I don't think a paradigm exists in the OSS space where I can buy an ordering system and just plug it into my environment,” says Nadji. He points to standards efforts, such as those underway in the TeleManagement Forum and OSS/J, as being close to breakthroughs in this area and cites web services as a key enabler.

How Vendors Can Increase their Value
Vendors can begin to improve their value propositions by asking more questions about service providers’ business problems before they target them as prospects. “What really impressed me as a buyer was when the OSS provider made it clear to me they had done their homework. They knew my business specific to my company, my priorities and my pain points,” says Mark Feness, former network management director with a Tier 1 U.S. network provider. He says OSS offerings are driven too much by technology requirements, and not enough by business needs.

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