“The digital world is much more fragmented – an ecosystem of different players each delivering their element of the service – with a different access network, core network, computing, storage and many applications providers. And where services comprise a number of aggregated application services, the challenges get even harder.
If the only person getting the end-to-end picture of the overall service quality is the user, trouble is bound to follow.”
Keith Willetts.
In previous blog entries I’ve talked about the scarcest resource being customers (note that it says scarcest, not scariest). But perhaps this net is widening ever further.
The digital world that Keith Willetts talks about in the quote above is seeing a heavier dependence on technology by enterprise. And it’s not just technology, but the breadth of technologies – carrier services, access network, compute power, storage, apps, security, high availability, machine-to-machine, etc. These technologies are generally provided by different providers who have different ambitions, different terminology sets and different contractual constructs to deal with. There is no end-to-end picture, nor accountability for that matter.
Does a niche exist for a simple OSS that encapsulates all these technologies at a price point that is far smaller than anything we’ve ever seen because of its ability to service a far larger customer base and achieve greater economies of scale than we’ve ever seen?
So many new startups have a business model built around these technologies. As the successful ones grow, the dimensions of their technology footprint grows too, so the spend on the simple OSS grows with them.