Is OSS the future of OSS?

Don’t worry. The title of this post isn’t a typo, but I’ll get to that shortly.

I’ve just had an interesting day 2 at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was again quite high with further thought-provoking ideas!!

My favorite session for the day was a panel discussion entitled, “Is open-source the future of OSS/BSS?” Hence the title of today’s blog. Is OSS (open source software) the future of OSS?

Trevor Cheung of OpenROADS Community spoke about their framework for delivering transformation. One point he emphasised was that we’re so wrapped up in Customer Experience (CX), we often forget about Employee Experience. Put simply, if we don’t win the hearts and minds of the implementers, there’s never going to be a transformed experience for the customers to have.

Jurgen Hase of unlimit gave a number of really interesting perspectives, but the best is paraphrased as follows, “The S in IoT stands for security… Wait, what? There is no S in IoT??”

Next was Angelia Ooi of TIME. Angelia provided 8 really useful tips on digital transformation via a presentation pack that is easily the most succinct and polished of all those I’ve seen at DTA so far.

Joddy Hernady of Telkom Indonesia provided some of the economics of becoming a digital telco, which provided an interesting perspective on the benefits of achieving digital transformation.

But finally, and it was the last presentation of the day that was most thought-provoking. Is open source the future of OSS/BSS?
Unfortunately I missed almost all of Catherine Michel’s opening gambit, but I believe the CTO of Sigma Systems made the key point that open source projects such as Mongo DB should really only be considered once they’d reached a level of maturity, ongoing development and support that approaches the large ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) such as Sigma Systems. She also highlighted the multi-layered challenges around licensing / rights.
Gnanapriya Chidambaranathan of Infosys contended that there is a wealth of open source projects that can be leveraged, curated and supported by integrators such as Infosys. She posed that open source adoption is a key to innovation.
Venura Mendis of Apigate provided the perspective of an open source software provider. He highlighted the challenge he faces in dealing with traditional carrier procurement teams, particularly in their ambition of reaching comparative TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) models.
Guy Lupo of Telstra provided a number of different and interesting perspectives, as he regularly does, this time on a carrier deciding between ISV, open source products and going down the path (rabbit hole?) of open sourcing their own developments. Guy’s perspectives were really pertinent as he’s currently utilising all of these options in his NaaS (Network as a Service) program at Telstra.

Finally, a few thoughts from me on the topic of OSS as the future of OSS.

1. One of the biggest challenges facing the future of OSS is fragmentation. The PAOSS vendor list has over 200 records (and I’ll be doing a major update again shortly that will add hundreds of additional vendors). This means the available skills pool is diluted with a lot of functionality duplication. It also means it becomes really challenging for customers to choose the right product for their needs (although we could claim that this is a good thing for PAOSS as we often assist customers with this challenge). The proliferation of open source projects that deliver OSS/BSS functionality further fragments and dilutes

2. We’re seeing a trend away from the behemoth software stacks of the past for a variety of reasons, but could be summed up as the laws of physics preventing us from making a large-scale OSS pivots. The more modular OSS appear to be more nimble. This plays into the hands of niche open source offerings. It appears contra to the massive-scale open source efforts of ONAP, which interestingly, the above mentioned panelists also held doubts over ONAP’s ability to succeed. I should note that they, like me, were also enthusiastic about facets of ONAP such as the collaboration, initiative taken, etc.

3. I still believe there is the potential to build an open-source OSS core that then allows collaboration and plug-ins to be developed, thus better leveraging the long tail of innovation from the available skills pool. Today’s panelists did throw something of a spanner in these works though by pointing out the layered licensing challenge with open source. It’s quite common for open source projects to leverage open source projects, which in turn leverage open source projects. Guy in particular highlighted just how big a problem it has been for Telstra’s procurement team to trace out all the open source threads.

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