Google’s Circular Economy in OSS

OSS wear many hats and help many different functions within an organisation. One function that OSS assists might be surprising to some people – the CFO / Accounting function.

The traditional service provider business model tends to be CAPEX-heavy, with significant investment required on physical infrastructure. Since assets need to be depreciated and life-cycle managed, Accountants have an interest in the infrastructure that our OSS manage via Inventory Management (IM) tools.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with many network operators and see vastly different asset management approaches used by CFOs. These strategies have ranged from fastidious replacement of equipment as soon as depreciation cycles have expired through to building networks using refurbished equipment that has already passed manufacturer End-of-Life dates. These strategies fundamentally effect the business models of these operators.

Given that telecommunications operator revenues are trending lower globally, I feel it’s incumbent on us to use our OSS to deliver positive outcomes to global business models. 

With this in mind, I found this article entitled, “Circular Economy at Work in Google Data Centers,” to be quite interesting. It cites, “Google’s circular approach to optimizing end of life of servers based on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) principles have resulted in hundreds of millions per year in cost avoidance.”

Google Asset Lifecycle

Asset lifecycle management is not your typical focus area for OSS experts, but an area where we can help add significant value for our customers!

Some operators use dedicated asset management tools such as SAP. Others use OSS IM tools. Others reconcile between both. There’s no single right answer.

For a deeper dive into ideas where our OSS can help in asset lifecycle (which Google describes as its Circular Economy and seems to manage using its ReSOLVE tool), I really recommend reviewing the article link above.

If you need to develop such a tool using machine learning models, reach out to us and we’ll point you towards some tools equivalent to ReSOLVE to augment your OSS.

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