Making a basic assessment of OSS value

“…as technology gets more complicated, it becomes more difficult for buyers to acquire the skills needed to make even a basic assessment of value. Without such an assessment, it’s hard to get a project going, and in particular hard to get one going the right way.”
Tom Nolle
.

Have you noticed that over the last few years, OSS choice has proliferated, making project assessment more challenging? Previously, the COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) product solution dominated. That was already a challenge because there are hundreds to choose from (there are around 400 on our vendors page alone). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We now also have choices to make across factors such as:

  • Building OSS tools with open-source projects
  • An increasing amount of in-house development (as opposed to COTS implementations by the product’s vendors)
  • Smaller niche products that need additional integration
  • An increase in the number of “standards” that are seeking to solve traditional OSS/BSS problems (eg ONAP, ETSI’s ZSM, TM Forum’s ODA, etc, etc)
  • Revolutions from the IT world such as cloud, containerisation, virtualisation, etc

As Tom indicates in the quote above, the diversity of skills required to make these decisions is broadening. Broadening to the point where you generally need a large team to have suitable skills coverage to make even a basic assessment of value.

At Passionate About OSS, we’re seeking to address this in the following ways:

  • We have two development projects underway (more news to come)
    • One to simplify the vendor / product selection process
    • One to assist with up-skilling on open-source and IT tools to build modern OSS
  • In addition to existing pages / blogs, we’re assembling more content about “standards” evolution, which should appear on this blog in coming days
  • Use our “Finding an Expert” tool to match experts to requirements
  • And of course there are the variety of consultancy services we offer ranging from strategy, roadmap, project business case and vendor selection through to resource identification and implementation. Leave us a message on our contact page if you’d like to discuss more

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