Category Archives: Vendor

Vendors provide the products that go into the OctopOSS soup

OSS feature parity. A functionality arms race

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OSS Vendor 1. “I have 1 million features.” (Dr Evil puts finger in mouth)
OSS Vendor 2. “Yeah, well I have 1,000,001 features in my OSS.”

This is the arms-race that we see in OSS, just like almost any other tech product. I imagine that vendors get into this arms-race because they wish to differentiate. Better to differentiate on functionality than price. If there’s a feature parity, then the only differentiator is price. We all know that doesn’t end well!

But I often ask myself a few related questions:

  • Of those million features, how many are actually used regularly
  • As a vendor do you have logging that actually allows you to know what features are being used
  • Taking the Whale Curve perspective, even if being used, how many of those features are actually contributing to the objectives of the vendor
    • Do they clearly contribute towards making sales
    • Do customers delight in using them
    • Would customers be irate if you removed them
    • etc

Earlier this week, I spoke about a friend who created an alarm management tool by himself over a weekend. It didn’t have a million features, but it did have all of what I’d consider to be the most important ones. It did look like a lot of other alarm managers that are now on the market. The GUI based on alarm lists still pervades.

If they all look alike, and all have feature parity, how do you differentiate? If you try to add more features, is it safe to assume that those features will deliver diminishing returns?

But is an alarm list and the flicking of tickets the best way to manage network health?

What if, instead of seeking incremental improvement, someone went back to the most important requirements and considered whether the current approach is meeting those customer needs? I have a strong suspicion that customer feedback will indicate that there are definitely flaws to overcome, especially on high event volume networks.

Clever use of large data volumes provides a level of pre-cognition and automation that wasn’t available when simple alarm lists were first invented. This in turn potentially changes the way that operators can engage with network monitoring and management.

What if someone could identify a whole new user interface / approach that overcame the current flaws and exceeded the key requirements? Would that be more of a differentiator than adding a 1,000,002nd feature?

If you’re looking for a comparison, there were plenty of MP3 players on the market with a heap of features, many more than the iPod. We all know how that one played out!

Pitching an OSS? Don’t call it OSS.

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““If you asked me how to sell cybersecurity, I wouldn’t call it cybersecurity.” The raw truth of the statement hit me like a lightning bolt between the eyes. Cybersecurity might loosely describe what we do, and we tell people it’s what we’re selling, but it’s not what people buy.
Safety. Assurance. Peace of mind. Confidence. These are the kinds of things that people buy, concepts which ordinary people can understand and relate to because they are feelings which they have experienced themselves. Cybersecurity is not a next gen firewall, or multi-layered endpoint protection with machine learning and threat sandbox technology. Cybersecurity is not risk management or ISO27001 policies. Cybersecurity is being able to use the Internet in any way I can imagine without having to worry I might lose my family photos, get robbed, or get in trouble with my boss. If you could (honestly) sell me “worry free Internet”, I’d buy it in a heartbeat, and so would everyone you know.”
Corch X, here.

Sound familiar?
If you asked me how to sell OSS, I wouldn’t call it OSS. Doh! Now you enlighten me… after I’ve already chosen the domain name, PassionateAboutOSS.com. After I’ve already written over 2,000 posts on topics like orchestration, microservices, cloud-native, DevOps, and every other technical buzzword. Time to start again from scratch.

One thing in my favour is that you, the audience I’m interacting with, also speaks in the same jargon. These are the terms we use to communicate with each other. To get things started. To get things done. To get things delivered.

That’s all fine if we’re only interacting with like-minded OSS experts. However, of the thousands of people who interact with our OSS / BSS, only a small percentage are OSS experts. A majority of people use the tools rather than designing, building or commissioning them.

The people who use the tools have a huge range of job roles and reasons for needing to use our OSS / BSS. Just like with cybersecurity, the core reasons could be Safety. Assurance. Peace of mind. Confidence. But they might also include Speed. Efficiency. Reliability. Repeatability. Simplicity. Monetisation. Insightful. And more.

The challenge we have is that so much of the benefit that our OSS and BSS deliver is intangible. We might talk about orchestration delivering speed, simplicity, reliability, etc. But how do we establish a more tangible link?

How do we achieve the equivalent of what the “Intel Inside” marketing ploy delivered, which made people associate an otherwise obscure integrated circuit with a premium feature to consider when they bought their next computing device. How do we ensure that people know that our OSS / BSS is the master of puppets that make our networks dance? It’s our OSS / BSS that are pulling all the strings of operationalisation, connecting customers with networks.

Would an EoL be beneficial for OSS?

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In the world of networking, it’s common for devices to go EOL (end-of-life). Capital spend and depreciation models are based around refresh cycles of around 5-7 years. Vendors reinforce this refresh cycle by designing obsolescence into maintenance, support and part supplies. Customers tend to simply submit to the risk of having no vendor support by buying the next generation replacements.

But how often do you hear of an OSS going EOL? Not often right? They tend to get written off only when the cost of upkeep outweighs new revenues.

I know, I can hear you saying that software is different from hardware and of course I agree with you. I’d partially counter by claiming that software architectures and development platforms also have a discernibly useful life just like physical network devices. If you doubt that, I’m sure you’ve seen OSS tools with origins in the 1990s that are still being developed upon. I tend to believe that product usefulness becomes asymptotic for its vendors. With the speed of change and proliferation of new platforms, useful lives are getting ever-shorter.

Would a pre-ordained product replacement life-cycle be beneficial for the OSS industry? It has some merits.

For a start, planned obsolescence enforces designs with interchangeability, in line with the small-grid OSS described yesterday. It promotes short-term enhancements to long-term visions. It becomes easier for customers to write off their investment and inject new capital into the vendor market. It penalises the amount of Frankenstein integrations that tend to become increasingly burdensome (to vendor and customer) into the future. It enforces those mythical beasts of telco software – subtraction projects. It promotes innovation to avoid the asymptotic benefit deterioration curve shown below:
Asymptotic OSS feature development

As the asymptote is being reached, a new jumping-off point commences with the new product.

But it’s a difficult status-quo to break. Vendors have invested millions of developer hours into their products. Taking a product EoL is effectively throwing that invested effort away. For carriers, it means the risk and cost of breaking integrations / processes and replacing them with new ones.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether an EOL model might be relevant / useful for your OSS.

The future of work and its impact on OSS

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Many years ago, I worked on a seriously big OSS transformation for one of the region’s biggest telcos. Everything was big on the project, the investment, the resources, the documentation. Everything except the outcomes. There was so much inefficiency that I often spoke about making one day of progress for every ten on site. Meetings, bureaucracy, impossible approval cycles, customer re-organisations, over-analysis, etc all added up to stagnation.

This contrasted so much with some of the amazing small teams I’ve worked alongside. Teams that worked cohesively, cleverly and just got stuff done with almost no resources. It’s one of the reasons I feel that the future of work, even for the very large organisations, will be via small teams. Outsourced to small, efficient teams / organisations. The gig economy, and the proliferation of tools that support it, make it an obvious approach to take, especially for very large organisations to leverage. Proof of work technologies, such as those building upon the discovery of blockchain, will provide further impetus to use smaller teams of experts.

Experts like a friend and colleague of mine who once built an alarm management tool in a weekend, by himself. It also happened to be more sophisticated than his employer’s existing tool that had taken years of combined developer effort by a larger team.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I see the transition to this model of work as being inevitable. The question I have is how to make our OSS more accommodating of this work model. Behemoth OSS stacks won’t. Highly modular OSS made up of many smaller components probably will, as long as they don’t succumb to the OSS chessboard analogy. The pulleys and strings will make it impossible for small, interchangable teams to decipher and manage.

A small-grid OSS model is the one I’d be backing in.

OSS – like a duck on a pond

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Let’s start with a basic question. “What does an OSS need to do?”

The basic answer is, “make operations easier.”

The real answer(s) is so much more nuanced than that of course. The term easier can also encapsulate other words such as faster, more accurate, more repeatable, cheaper, etc.

Designing, building, operating and maintaining a sizable network is extremely challenging, despite network operators around the world, and the vendors that supply to them, employing some of the best and brightest. So we design OSS and related tools / processes to make operations easier.

Yet I sometimes wonder whether we achieve that aim – to make operations easier. Seems to me that we tend to focus more on just replicating functions at a higher layer in the management stack. That is, moving the function to the OSS rather than EMS/NMS, without really making it much easier operationally.

Let’s start at the user interface (UI). How often are they intuitive enough for an experienced network operator to start doing tasks with negligible OSS expert guidance?
Let’s look at deployments. How often are the projects low on effort, risk, cost and complexity?
Let’s look at flexibility (ie in-flight modifications or transformations). How often do we actually deliver flexibility to our customers through our OSS. To ask the same as above, how often are our changes low on effort, risk, cost and complexity?

As a small step towards providing an answer, I wonder whether it’s a case of making the hard things look easy and the easy things look hard.

We want to make the really hard operational things much easier to do within an OSS because that’s the primary purpose of an OSS. That’s the example of a duck on a pond. The OSS is gliding along effortlessly across the top of the water, but under the water it is paddling furiously.

Conversely, we want to make the really easy* operational things look hard to do within an OSS so that we’re not constantly being asked to build functionality / complexity into our OSS that doesn’t warrant being there. It diffuses the intent of the OSS. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

OSS implementation, but without the dependencies

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One of the challenges with getting a new OSS or OSS transformation project completed can be the large number of dependencies that can cause momentum gridlock. If you’re looking to deliver business value in one big-bang, which is a really common approach to delivering OSS projects, then you end up juggling many different activities and hoping they all align at the right times.

I’ve noticed that the vendors tend to design their delivery schedules around big-bang / waterfall approaches like below.
Big-bang OSS delivery

Many vendors will even assure you that this is their standard practice and are hesitant to consider changes to their “best practice” delivery scheduling. Having been involved in many of these types of deliveries in the past, on both vendor and customer side, I can assure you that they rarely work well.

Generally speaking, the gridlocks occur on the customer-side, but the result is detrimental to customer and vendor alike. Hold-ups mean inefficient allocation of resources as well as the resultant cost / time over-runs.

The alternative is to apply a bit more lateral thinking to how you break down the work into smaller chunks. The lateral thinking work breakdown aims are two-fold:

  1. How to break up the work so that it best avoids dependencies; whilst also
  2. Delivering some sort of value to the customer

There are many dependencies on a typical OSS project – hardware, procurement, IT infrastructure, network connectivity, security, approvals, integrations, licensing, resource availability, data quality and many more. However, each different customer, their org chart and project has its own unique mix of dependencies, so I don’t subscribe to the “best practice” argument to project delivery.

The diagram below shows an example of an alternate breakdown. The business value chunks that are delivered might be tiny in some cases, but at least momentum can be demonstrated. Rather than having a mass of entwined dependencies, you can isolate and minimise dependencies for that sliver of business value. When the dependency/ies has cleared, you can jump straight onto the next activity from an existing build-state rather than having to align all the activities to land in perfect precision.
Incremental OSS work breakdown

OSS that are profitable, difficult, or important?

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“Apple became the first company to be worth a trillion dollars. They did that by spending five years single-mindedly focusing on doing profitable work. They’ve consistently pushed themselves toward high margin luxury goods and avoided just about everything else. Belying their first two decades, when they focused on breakthrough work that was difficult and perhaps important, nothing they’ve done recently has been either…
Profitable, difficult, or important — each is an option. A choice we get to make every day. ‘None of the above’ is also available, but I’m confident we can seek to do better than that. ”
Seth Godin in this post.

I encourage you to view the entire post at the link above. It gives definitions (and examples) of organisations that focus on profitable, difficult or important activities.

In OSS, the organisations that focus on the profitable are the ones investing heavily on glossy sales / marketing and only making incremental improvements to products that have been around for years.

Then there are others that are doing the difficult and innovative and complex work (ie the sexy work for all of us tech-heads). This recent article about ONAP talks about the fantastic tech-driven ambitions of that program, but then distills it down to the business objectives.

That leaves us with the important – the business needs / objectives – and this is where the customers come in. Speak with any OSS customer (or customer’s customer for that matter) and you’ll tend to find frustrations with their OSS. Frustration with complexity, time to deliver / modify, cost to deliver / modify, risks, functionality constraints, etc.

This is a simplification of course, but do you notice that as an industry, our keen focus on the profitable and difficult might just be holding us back from doing the important?

OSS designed as a bundle, or bundled after?

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Over the years I’m sure you’ve seen many different OSS demonstrations. You’ve probably also seen presentations by vendors / integrators that have shown multiple different products from their suite.

How integrated have they appeared to you?

  1. Have they seemed tightly integrated, as if carved from a single piece of stone?
  2. Or have they seemed loosely integrated, a series of obviously different stones joined together with some mortar?
  3. Or perhaps even barely associated, a series of completely different objects (possibly through product acquisition) branded under a common marketing name?

There are different pros and cons with each approach. Tight integration possibly suits a greenfields OSS. Looser integration perhaps better suits carve-off for best-of-breed customer architecture models.

I don’t know about you, but I always prefer to be given the impression that an attempt has been made to ensure consistency in the bundling. Consistency of user-interface, workflow, data modelling/presentation, reports, etc. With modern presentation layers, database technologies and the availability of UX / CX expertise, this should be less of a hurdle than it has been in the past.

If ONAP is the answer, what are the questions?

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“ONAP provides a comprehensive platform for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly automate new services and support complete lifecycle management.
By unifying member resources, ONAP is accelerating the development of a vibrant ecosystem around a globally shared architecture and implementation for network automation–with an open standards focus–faster than any one product could on its own.”
Part of the ONAP charter from onap.org.

The ONAP project is gaining attention in service provider circles. The Steering Committee of the ONAP project hints at the types of organisations investing in the project. The statement above summarises the mission of this important project. You can bet that the mission has been carefully crafted. As such, one can assume that it represents what these important stakeholders jointly agree to be the future needs of their OSS.

I find it interesting that there are quite a few technical terms (eg policy-driven orchestration) in the mission statement, terms that tend to pre-empt the solution. However, I don’t feel that pre-emptive technical solutions are the real mission, so I’m going to try to reverse-engineer the statement into business needs. Hopefully the business needs (the “why? why? why?” column below) articulates a set of questions / needs that all OSS can work to, as opposed to replicating the technical approach that underpins ONAP.

Phrase Interpretation Why? Why? Why?
real-time The ability to make instantaneous decisions Why1: To adapt to changing conditions
Why2: To take advantage of fleeting opportunities or resolve threats
Why 3: To optimise key business metrics such as financials
Why 4: As CSPs are under increasing pressure from shareholders to deliver on key metrics
policy-driven orchestration To use policies to increase the repeatability of key operational processes Why 1: Repeatability provides the opportunity to improve efficiency, quality and performance
Why 2: Allows an operator to service more customers at less expense
Why 3: Improves corporate profitability and customer perceptions
Why 4: As CSPs are under increasing pressure from shareholders to deliver on key metrics
policy-driven automation To use policies to increase the amount of automation that can be applied to key operational processes Why 1: Automated processes provide the opportunity to improve efficiency, quality and performance
Why 2: Allows an operator to service more customers at less expense
Why 3: Improves corporate profitability and customer perceptions
physical and virtual network functions Our networks will continue to consist of physical devices, but we will increasingly introduce virtualised functionality Why 1: Physical devices will continue to exist into the foreseeable future but virtualisation represents an exciting approach into the future
Why 2: Virtual entities are easier to activate and manage (assuming sufficient capacity exists)
Why 3: Physical equipment supply, build, deploy and test cycles are much longer and labour intensive
Why 4: Virtual assets are more flexible, faster and cheaper to commission
Why 5: Customer services can be turned up faster and cheaper
software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers With this increase in virtualisation, we find an increasingly large and diverse array of suppliers contributing to our value-chain. These suppliers contribute via software, network equipment, IT functions and cloud resources Why 1: CSPs can access innovation and efficiency occurring outside their own organisation
Why 2: CSPs can leverage the opportunities those innovations provide
Why 3: CSPs can deliver more attractive offers to customers
Why 4: Key metrics such as profitability and customer satisfaction are enhanced
rapidly automate new services We want the flexibility to introduce new products and services far faster than we do today Why 1: CSPs can deliver more attractive offers to customers faster than competitors
Why 2: Key metrics such as market share, profitability and customer satisfaction are enhanced as well as improved cashflow
support complete lifecycle management The components that make up our value-chain are changing and evolving so quickly that we need to cope with these changes without impacting customers across any of their interactions with their service Why 1: Customer satisfaction is a key metric and a customer’s experience spans the entire lifecyle of their service.
Why 2: CSPs don’t want customers to churn to competitors
Why 3: Key metrics such as market share, profitability and customer satisfaction are enhanced
unifying member resources To reduce the amount of duplicated and under-synchronised development currently being done by the member bodies of ONAP Why 1: Collaboration and sharing reduces the effort each member body must dedicate to their OSS
Why 2: A reduced resource pool is required
Why 3: Costs can be reduced whilst still achieving a required level of outcome from OSS
vibrant ecosystem To increase the level of supplier interchangability Why 1: To reduce dependence on any supplier/s
Why 2: To improve competition between suppliers
Why 3: Lower prices, greater choice and greater innovation tend to flourish in competitive environments
Why 4: CSPs, as customers of the suppliers, benefit
globally shared architecture To make networks, services and support systems easier to interconnect across the global communications network Why 1: Collaboration on common standards reduces the integration effort between each member at points of interconnect
Why 2: A reduced resource pool is required
Why 3: Costs can be reduced whilst still achieving interconnection benefits

As indicated in earlier posts, ONAP is an exciting initiative for the CSP industry for a number of reasons. My fear for ONAP is that it becomes such a behemoth of technical complexity that it becomes too unwieldy for use by any of the member bodies. I use the analogy of ATM versus Ethernet here, where ONAP is equivalent to ATM in power and complexity. The question is whether there’s an Ethernet answer to the whys that ONAP is trying to solve.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(BTW. I’m not saying that the technologies the ONAP team is investigating are the wrong ones. Far from it. I just find it interesting that the mission is starting with a technical direction in mind. I see parallels with the OSS radar analogy.)

Where are the reliability hotspots in your OSS?

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As you already know, there are two categories of downtime – unplanned (eg failures) and planned (eg upgrades / maintenance).

Planned downtime sounds a lot nicer (for operators) but the reality is that you could call both types “incidents” – they both impact (or potentially impact) the customer. We sometimes underestimate that fact.

Today’s question is whether you’re able to identify where the hotspots are in your OSS suite when you combine both types of downtime. Can you tell which outages are service-impacting?

In a round-about way, I’m asking whether you already have a dashboard that monitors uptime of all the components (eg applications, probes, middleware, infra, etc) that make up your complete OSS / BSS estate? If you do, does it tell you what you anecdotally know already, or are there sometimes surprises?

Does the data give you the evidence you need to negotiate with the implementers of problematic components (eg patch cadence, the need for reliability fixes, streamlining the patch process, reduction in customisations, etc)? Does it give you reason to make architectural changes (eg webscaling)?

Chasing the big OSS waves

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The diagram below attempts to show how the entire market (whether that’s the supplier-side or the buyer-side) will absorb a given new feature.

The leaders pick up the concept at T0 and then it takes another few years before the laggards implement it.
OSS Buyer Developer Curve

Most of us in the OSS implementation world crave to be at the leading edge of change. The right-side of the curve is definitely the sexier side to be on. I know I do. It’s part of the reason this blog exists – to stay abreast of the exciting new ideas, projects and technologies that are coming through in OSS. Funnily enough, there’s probably even people within most of the laggards who are already excited about a new concept not long after T0, but are just unable to implement it until much later.

Supplier sales-pitches also tend to focus on the right side of the curve. That’s where the buzz is. That’s where the premiums are, the rewards for being first to market. It’s the customers on the right-side of the curve that are most attractive as sales targets for many suppliers.

But I also wonder whether the increasing proliferation of tech options within OSS means there’s also increasing inefficiency for suppliers (and possibly buyers) on the right side of the curve? Do we focus all our development efforts on ONAP or [insert any of millions of other alternative platforms, technologies, ideas, etc] today? What if the mass-market goes down an alternate path to the one you’ve chosen? How long before you identify a divergence from the mass-market trend? What’s the impact of changing direction (or not)? Are you bound to spill some blood by playing on the bleeding edge?

The left side of the graph is arguably more predictable. You can already see where the market is trending. Has the whole concept just been hype or has this new thing really made a difference for customers? Most of the implementation hurdles are likely to have already been resolved. Products have matured. More integrations, reports, etc have been developed. Waters have already been chartered.

I don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I also have a suspicion that there’s less supplier competition for the business of laggard or follower customers. I’ve seen some companies that have thrived on this model. They get a nice unimpeded ride on the back of the wave whilst everyone else is fighting to catch the front-edge of it.

Chasing the left side of the curve might seem counter-intuitive because it clearly represents a falling market. But there’s always the next wave to jump onto, each with similar predictability and reduced competition.

Not only that, but a majority of the the most important OSS use-cases have been around for many years. It’s increasingly difficult to find new functionality that delivers tangible benefits. Whilst other suppliers have jumped off to chase the next big thing, the followers can keep refining their solutions for what matters most.

Let me pose the question this way – Can you think of a single OSS product that is so refined that it can’t do the basics any better than it already does? Nope??

If your partners don’t have to talk to you then you win

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“If your partners don’t have to talk to you then you win.”
Guy Lupo.

Put another way, the best form of customer service is no customer service (ie your customers and/or partners are so delighted with your automated offerings that they have no reason to contact you). They don’t want to contact you anyway (generally speaking). They just want to consume a perfectly functional and reliable solution.

In the deep, distant past, our comms networks required operators. But then we developed automated dialling / switching. In theory, the network looked after itself and people made billions of calls per year unassisted.

Something happened in the meantime though. Telco operators the world over started receiving lots of calls about their platform and products. You could say that they’re unwanted calls. The telcos even have an acronym called CVR – Call Volume Reduction – that describes their ambitions to reduce the number of customer calls that reach contact centre agents. Tools such as chatbots and IVR have sprung up to reduce the number of calls that an operator fields.

Network as a Service (NaaS), the context within Guy’s comment above, represents the next new tool that will aim to drive CVR (amongst a raft of other benefits). NaaS theoretically allows customers to interact with network operators via impersonal contracts (in the form of APIs). The challenge will be in the reliability – ensuring that nothing falls between the cracks in any of the layers / platforms that combine to form the NaaS.

In the world of NaaS creation, Guy is exactly right – “If your partners [and customers] don’t have to talk to you then you win.” As always, it’s complexity that leads to gaps. The more complex the NaaS stack, the less likely you are to achieve CVR.

An alternate way of slicing OSS projects

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One of the biggest challenges of big bang OSS project implementations is that all of the business value (ie the OSS and its data, workflows, integrations, etc) gets delivered at once, normally at the end of a lengthy exercise.

Ok, ok, so the delivery of value is not a challenge, it’s the implications of a big delivery of value that’s the challenge – implications that include:

  1. If the project runs out of funds before the project finishes, no value is delivered
  2. If there’s no modularity of delivery then the project team must stay the course of the original project plan. There’s no room for prioritising or dropping or including delivery modules. Project plans are rarely perfect at first after all
  3. Any changes in project plan tend to have knock-on effects into the rest of the delivery due to the sequential nature of typical project plans
  4. Any delivery of value represents a milestone, which in turn demonstrates momentum for the project… a key change management and team morale strategy
  5. Large deliverables represent the proverbial “pig in the python” – only one segment of the python (ie segment of the project delivery team) is engaged (hyper-engaged) whilst the other segments remain under-utilised.  This isn’t great for project flow or utilisation

When tasked with designing a project schedule, I’ve noticed that many vendors tend to follow the typical waterfall delivery and corresponding payment milestones (eg. design, then build, then test, then deploy, then hand over). The downside of this approach is that the business value (for the customer) is delivered at the end of the handover (ie big bang). There’s no business value in delivering design artefacts for example – the customer can’t use them to perform operational tasks.

The model I prefer sees incremental business value being delivered such as:

  • Proof of Concept (PoC) build
  • Sandpit build
  • Out of the box (OOTB) production build (ie. no customisations)
  • End-to-end use case #1 delivery (ie. design, build*, test, deploy, handover)
  • E2E use case #2 delivery
  • …
  • E2E use case #n delivery

where build* includes incremental configuration, customisation, integration, data migration, etc.

Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM)

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Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM) is a next-gen network management approach using closed-loop principles hosted by ETSI. An ETSI blog has just demonstrated the first ZSM Proof of Concept (PoC). The slide deck describing the PoC, supplied by EnterpriseWeb, can be found here.

The diagram below shows a conceptual closed-loop assurance architecture used within the PoC
ETSI ZSM PoC.

It contains some similar concepts to a closed-loop traffic engineering project designed by PAOSS back in 2007, but with one big difference. That 2007 project was based on a single-vendor solution, as opposed to the open, multi-vendor PoC demonstrated here. Both were based on the principle of using assurance monitors to trigger fulfillment responses. For example, ours used SLA threshold breaches on voice switches to trigger automated remedial response through the OSS‘s provisioning engine.

For this newer example, ETSI’s blog details, “The PoC story relates to a congestion event caused by a DDoS (Denial of Service) attack that results in a decrease in the voice quality of a network service. The fault is detected by service monitoring within one or more domains and is shared with the end-to-end service orchestrator which correlates the alarms to interpret the events, based on metadata and metrics, and classifies the SLA violations. The end-to-end service orchestrator makes policy-based decisions which trigger commands back to the domain(s) for remediation.”

You’ll notice one of the key call-outs in the diagram above is real-time inventory. That was much harder for us to achieve back in 2007 than it is now with virtualised network and compute layers providing real-time telemetry. We used inventory that was only auto-discovered once daily and had to build in error handling, whilst relying on over-provisioned physical infrastructure.

It’s exciting to see these types of projects being taken forward by ETSI, EnterpriseWeb, et al.

Aggregated OSS buying models

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Last week we discussed a sell-side co-op business model. Today we’ll look at buy-side co-op models.

In other industries, we hear of buying groups getting great deals through aggregated buying volumes. This is a little harder to achieve with products that are as uniquely customised as OSS. It’s possible that OSS buy-side aggregation could occur for operators that are similar in nature but don’t compete (eg regional operators). Having said that, I’ve yet to see any co-ops formed to gain OSS group-purchase benefits. If you have, I’d love to hear about it.

In OSS, there are three approaches that aren’t exactly co-op buying models but do aggregate the evaluation and buying decision.

The most obvious is for corporations that run multiple carriers under one umbrella such as Telefonica (see Telefonica’s various OSS / BSS contract notifications here), SingTel (group contracts here), etisalat, etc. There would appear to benefits in standardising OSS platforms across each of the group companies.

A far less formal co-op buying model I’ve noticed is the social-proof approach. This is where one, typically large, network operator in a region goes through an extensive OSS / BSS evaluation and chooses a vendor. Then there’s a domino effect where other, typically smaller, network operators also buy from the same vendor.

Even less formal again is by using third-party organisations like Passionate About OSS to assist with a standard vendor selection methodology. The vendors selected aren’t standardised because each operator’s needs are different, but the product / vendor selection methodology builds on the learnings of past selection processes across multiple operators. The benefits comes in the evaluation and decision frameworks.

The OSS co-op business model

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“A co-operative is a member-owned business structure with at least five members, all of whom have equal voting rights regardless of their level of involvement or investment. All members are expected to help run the cooperative.”
Small Business WA.

The co-op business model has fascinated me since doing some tech projects in the dairy industry in the deep distant past. The dairy co-ops empower collaboration of dairy farmers where the might of the collective outweighs that of each individually. As the collective, they’ve been able to establish massive processing plants, distribution lines, bargaining power, etc. The dairy co-ops are a sell-side collaboration.

By contrast open source projects like ONAP represent an interesting hybrid – part buy-side collaboration (ie the service providers acquiring software to run their organisations) and part sell-side (ie the vendors contributing code to the project alongside the service providers).

I’ve long been intrigued by the potential for a pure sell-side co-operative in OSS.

As we all know, the OSS market is highly fragmented (just look the number of vendors / products on this page), which means inefficiency because of the duplicated effort across vendors. A level of market efficiency comes from mergers and acquisitions. In addition, some comes from vendors forming partnerships to offer more complete solutions to a given customer requirement list.

But the key to a true sell-side OSS co-operative would be in the definition above – “at least five members.” Perhaps it’s an open-source project that brings them together. Perhaps it’s an extended partnership.

As Tom Nolle stated in an article that prompted the writing of today’s post, “On the vendor side, commoditization tends to force consolidation. A vendor who doesn’t have a nice market share has little to hope for but slow decline. A couple such vendors (like Infinera and Coriant, recently) can combine with the hope that the combination will be more survivable than the individual companies were likely to be. Consolidation weeds out industry inefficiencies like parallel costly operations structures, and so makes the remaining players stronger.”

Imagine for a moment if instead of having developers spread across 100 alarm management tools, that same developer pool can take a consolidated 5 alarm management products forward? Do you think we’d get better, more innovative, more complete products faster?

Having said that, co-ops have their weaknesses too.

What do you think? Could such a model work? Would it be a disaster?

OSS, with drama, without drama. Your choice

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A recent blog from Seth Godin brought back some memories from a past project.

“Two ways to solve a problem and provide a service.
With drama. Make sure the customer knows just how hard you’re working, what extent you’re going to in order to serve. Make a big deal out of the special order, the additional cost, the sweat and the tears.
Without drama. Make it look effortless.
Either can work. Depends on the customer and the situation.”
Seth Godin here.

Over the course of the long-running and challenging project, I worked under a number of different Program Directors. The second last (chronologically) took the team barrel-chested down the “With Drama” path whilst the last took the “Without Drama” approach.

The “With Drama” approach was very melodramatic and political, but to be honest, was also really draining. It was draining because of the high levels of contact (eg meetings, reports, etc), reducing the amount of productive delivery time.

The “Without Drama” approach did make it look effortless, because by comparison it was effortless. The Program Director took responsibility for peer-level contact and cleared the way for the delivery team to focus on delivering. The team was still working well over 60 hour weeks, but it was now more clearly focused on delivery tasks. Interestingly, this approach brought a seemingly endless project to a systematic and clean conclusion (ie delivery) within about three months.

Now I’m not sure about your experiences or preferences, but I’d go with the “Without Drama” OSS delivery approach every time. The emotional intensity required of the “With Drama” approach just isn’t sustainable over long-running projects like our OSS projects tend to be.

What are your thoughts / experiences?

How an OSS is like an F1 car

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A recent post discussed the challenge of getting a timeslice of operations people to help build the OSS. That post surmised, “as the old saying goes, you get back what you put in. In the case of OSS I’ve seen it time and again that operations need to contribute significantly to the implementation to ensure they get a solution that fits their needs.”

I have a new saying for you today, this time from T.D. Jakes, “You can’t be committed to the dream. You have to be committed to the process.”

If you’re representing an organisation that is buying an OSS solution from a vendor / integrator, please consider these two adages above. Sometimes we’re good at forming the dream (eg business requirements, business case, etc) and expecting the vendor to conduct almost all of the process. While our network operations teams are hired for the process of managing the network, we also need their significant input on the process of building / configuring an OSS. The vendor / integrator can’t just develop it in isolation and then hand it over to ops with a few days of training at the end.

The process of bringing a new OSS into an organisation is not like buying a road car. With an OSS, you can’t just place an order with some optional features like paint and trim specified, then expect to start driving it as soon as it leaves the vendor’s assembly line. It’s more like an F1 car where the driver is in constant communications with the pit-crew, changing and tweaking and refining to optimise the car to the driver’s unique needs (and in turn to hopefully optimise the results).

At least, that’s what current-state OSS are like. Perhaps in the future… we’ll strive to refine our OSS to be more like a road-car – standardised and intuitive enough for operators to drive straight off the assembly line.

The OSS transformation dilemma

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There’s a particular carrier that I know quite well that appears to despise a particular OSS vendor… but keeps coming back to them… and keeps getting let down by them… but keeps coming back to them. And I’m not just talking about support of their existing OSS, but whole new tools.

It never made sense to me… until reading Seth Godin’s blog today. In it, he states, “…this market segment knows that things that are too good to be true can’t possibly work, and that’s fine with them, because they don’t actually want to change–they simply want to be able to tell themselves that they tried. That the organization they paid their money to failed, of course it wasn’t their failure. Once you see that this short-cut market segment exists, you can choose to serve them or to ignore them. And you can be among them or refuse to buy in”

It starts to makes sense. The same carrier has a tendency to spend big money on the big-4 consultants whenever an important decision needs to be made. If the big, ambitious project then fails, the carrier’s project sponsors can say that the big-4 organization they paid their money to failed.

Does that ring true of any telco you’ve worked with? That they don’t actually want to change–they simply want to be able to tell themselves that they tried (or be seen to have tried) with their OSS transformation?

Are we actually stuck in one big dilemma? Are our OSS transformations actually so hard that they’re destined to fail, yet are already failing so badly that we desperately need to transform them? If so, then Seth’s insightful observation gives the appearance of progress AND protection from the pain of failure.

Not sure about you, but I’ll take Seth’s “refuse to buy in” option and try to incite change.