“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).
Telcos have tolerated lengthy OSS/BSS rollouts as a necessary evil for years, but what if those same systems are the chains holding the telco world
You’ve already got your dragon slayers. Your team is filled with seasoned OSS professionals who’ve faced complex, high-stakes problems and lived to tell the tale.
Many OSS veterans, the people who built the OSS of today, are no longer being offered full-time roles. Clients often assume they have become obsolete
This article provides a summary of our Buyer-Seller Chasm series of articles, where we start with the guiding principle that: The buyers (carriers) desperately need
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
