This industry won and lost

This Industry Will Be Won & Lost In the Next Three Years
John Chambers
on Light Reading.

Many of you will have noticed the recent partnership between Ericsson and Cisco. You will probably have noticed that they’re talking of partnership rather than merger due to the speed in which they can move. As they rightly point out, a merger could take years to play out, years that will see massive changes in the industries they operate in.

There seems to be some great alignments, with Ericsson bringing a pedigree of mobility, services to tier-1 CSPs (including OSS), whilst Cisco delivers strength in IP and enterprise. Both naturally are investing heavily in trying to corner the virtualised networking market, but are arguably trailing the likes of HP and Nokia / Alcatel. Cisco / Ericsson also have their own analytics solutions, so I’ll be interested to see which offering wins out in the partnership

Some of the concepts behind the partnership align closely with discussions here on PAOSS.

  • We will see more partnerships in line with John Reilly’s value fabric
  • Mobility playing an increasing part in comms service offerings
  • The need to deliver OSS that can operationalise network virtualisation
  • And to borrow from John Chambers’ comment, the massive changes to the communications landscape that will impact and mould the industry over the next 3+ years

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2 Responses

  1. When Cisco borgs an OSS company you rarely ever see much of it again. SO I totally agree that a partnership can be more successful than M&A.

    That said, let’s have a think.. Can we point to any really fruitful OSS partnerships?

    Hmm…

    In my personal experience the partnerships that work well are the lightest of lightest partnerships. Sometime you dont want a JVP… you just want access to the god damn APIs. And open APIs have been a challenge in the OSS industry historically, either because they have been subject to $1m licenses or because they just don’t exist.

    So, broad inclusive partnerships like OSSi get’s my thumbs up. As do decent vendor ‘developer’ partner programmes.

    Anything more involved than those tend to rapidly become marketing programmes, rather than product development programmes.

  2. Hi James
    Great comments!
    Partnerships can work at vendor to integrator (even with problems here) but vendor to vendor is rare as you suggested.
    I like your thoughts on OSSi too.
    $1m API licences are indeed a challenge. One project l worked on was shutdown because unforeseen API costs were more than the whole project budget!

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