OTT Clouds

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
Rabindranath Tagore.

In yesterday’s blog I discussed the aircraft carrier analogy when bringing rapid change into a legacy OSS.

The CSPs of the future will need to be based around partnerships. Not just the handful of partnerships of past, but partnerships with a multitude of OTT or cloud service providers that provide value-addition to the CSP’s customers.

The proud history of big CSP research labs can’t keep up with the massive diversity of innovation today. Just as Apple does with its iStore model, where any musician or application developer can develop a product, CSP’s need to develop their own equivalents to ensure they are tapped into a vast source of innovation, not just relying on what they develop in their own R&D labs. There’s no telling which releases will be amongst the tiny percentage that become enormous hits, but with the iStore model Apple profits from providing the mechanism that delivers all releases, no matter how successful or otherwise.

The “Not Invented Here” syndrome needs to be targeted and destroyed.

The impact for B/OSS is three-fold:

  1. Firstly these systems need to be nimble to cope with the constant innovation
  2. Secondly they need to be able to handle a limitless number of partnerships (read automation of the partner management process as much as possible) and
  3. Thirdly the B/OSS itself must be open to broader partnerships.

On the latter, the cloud model allows agile (and cost-effective) working groups to develop off-shoot products (ie the aircraft in the aircraft carrier analogy) that are either on or off-net without requiring any significant modification to the CSP’s core products, which are the carrier in the aircraft carrier analogy. API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) are the key to this model for the CSPs. Cloud providers should be able to spin up (ie monetise) new services for the CSP much faster than under the legacy OSS regime, often before the CSP even saw the opportunity for such a product to exist.

CSPs have a massive opportunity, specifically because they have the vast subscriber base (not to mention the infrastructure, trust and connections) that came with their legacy cash cows. But if they don’t provide the broad innovation to their customers, the market will find other ways to access those services and the CSP’s subscriber bases will diminish.

How many CSPs will retain their “Not Invented Here” mindset?

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