Guns don’t kill people, people do.
Similarly, Technology doesn’t kill OSS projects, people do… Actually people with technology do.
The following shows the escalation of global CAPEX allocated by CSPs over the last thirty years (in current currency).. apart from a few brief years around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
The CAPEX uplift also represents the increase in complexity in the networks and solutions used by CSPs. There are just more technologies in our networks than ever before. If you follow the trendline, we can predict that the challenges caused by increased complexity will be followed by even more investment in technologies that will further increase complexity. Just wait until virtualised networking spend hits its nadir!
And all of that complexity flows downstream to our OSS. The variants are killing us.
This may seem completely stupid to most people in the industry, but the supposed holy grail of ever-faster TTM (Time to Market) may actually be killing us more quickly – a faster TTM means a faster ramp-up of variants flowing down at us.
And our response to the increase in variants? That’s right – more technology – which just happens to add more variants. Did someone say death spiral??? π
But we’re made of sterner stuff. We’re not going to let that happen are we? We’re going to hire Chief Simplification Officers who will wield the Simple Stick across entire CSP organisations (not just Operations) and institute massive complexity reduction projects.