OSS Needs to Leap Forward (cont'd)

The OSS Vendor’s Leather Helmet
Donning the OSS vendor’s hat is like strapping on an old leather flying helmet – the kind early aviators wore as they struggled to keep their wood-and-string contraptions aloft. From the vendor’s perspective I think, OSS consolidation? OSS consolidation? Listen, chum, this is a business, not a welfare society for struggling Service Providers. We hold to the idea of free markets, and this industry is only going to consolidate when the market is good and ready. Right now, there’s nothing in it for me. Service Providers say they want rationalized system functionality, open standards, modularization, NGOSS compliance, and plug-and-play integration. We’d love to provide all of these things. But what’s in it for us? Where’s the money? Who is going to pay us extra for all these things? In fact, service providers say that what they really want is to slash the cost of acquiring and implementing systems. Slashing prices neither excites suppliers, nor does it give us incentive to act.

If every company in the OSS application business moved quickly in the direction service providers want, we'd rapidly end up with a few large vendors selling applications that could be made to work together seamlessly and effectively. Service providers might think this wonderful, but what happens to the hundreds of vendors in the market today? Few are confident that their companies will survive, and it's not just the small companies that feel this way. A few more years of selling expensive products in a confused market doesn't sound so bad, especially if the alternative is to face extinction in a streamlined market where every application is a standardized commodity.

Service Providers, the OSS vendor thinks, must believe we live in some kind of planned, centralized, Soviet-style economy – except without the centralization or the planning. The quirk of free market economics is that when it operates at the deal-by-deal level, it can influence product design and – to some extent – local pricing. But mostly the free market is not very good at driving a whole industry in a particular direction, regardless of what's good for the consumer. Individual purchasers really don't have much say. So Service Providers, just be patient. Keep issuing those RFPs and keep paying those system integration bills. And don't blame us vendors for your indecisiveness. We hate long sales cycles even more than you do.

The Disruptive Perspective
As December arrives, we’ll into the “bah humbug” season. I can indulge my occasional hobby where I look at the OSS sector as an impartial spectator who happens to read a lot. Let’s call this “The Disruptive” perspective because it does not attempt to rationalize the differing perspectives of vendors and service providers.

From this point of view, what I see looming is the all-broadband, all-IP world and the end of traditional telephony as we know it. I see dramatically simplified billing requirements and much more autonomous network management with smarter network elements. For the foreseeable future IP will direct the bits. What networks have to do will be increasingly simple in concept – carry those bits. At the same time the network will become increasingly smart, able to manage and repair itself and instruct the few humans left when to replace something that physically breaks.

In this new world, customers will manage all aspects of their service themselves. The idea of having to phone an office somewhere to place an order or increase bandwidth will be as quaint as having to talk to an operator to connect a call connected to a friend in the next street. This – according to all that reading I've done of course- was once how telephony worked.

Customer self management – and the competitive free market – will drive the simplification of services and the rationalization of charges. The cost of creating an itemized bill will soon far outweigh the possible losses of ‘all you can eat' flat rates. It will soon cost more to build an OSS environment than to build the infrastructure that carries the traffic, especially for smaller service providers.

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