“I don’t set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.”
Dick Clark.

There is an interesting trend brewing away. Have you noticed it?

The hardware in your network is becoming increasingly virtualised, ie the trend is from hardware to software, fixed to customisable.

Removing the control plane from a network device and placing it on separate compute infrastructure means that the B/OSS paradigm shifts. Control and monitoring no longer resides on the network device, but out on servers alongside the other management software systems, which would imply greater accessibility to the control plane by B/OSS.

This gives greater flexibility by the operator to modify the function of the control plane, thus potentially blurring the demarcation of traffic engineering, NMS, OSS into one software solution. It remains to be seen where the OSS vendor market will evolve with these technologies, but it seems to me that the OSS of the next 10 years will need a framework that is vastly different from the ones that have served us in the past 20-30 years. More revolution than evolution, meaning complete overhauls of old OSS core frameworks so that they are less structured and more nimble to handle the opportunities that the SDN provides.

The infographic below from ONS (Open Networking Summit) provides a view of one implementation of this trend, the software defined network (SDN).