“We can look and take lessons on how services evolved in the cloud space. Our customers have expressed how they want to take these services and want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge.”
Shawn Hakl.
Make no mistake, cloud OSS is still a deployment challenge (at this nascent stage at least), but in the context of OSS, Shawn Hakl’s quote asks the question, “who carries the burden of that deployment challenge?”
The big service providers have traditionally opted to take on the deployment challenge, almost wearing it as a badge of honour. I get it, because if done well, OSS can be a competitive differentiator.
The cloud model (ie hosted by a trusted partner) becomes attractive from the perspective of repeatability, from the efficiency of doing the same thing repeatedly at scale. Unfortunately this breaks down in a couple of ways for OSS (currently at least).
Firstly, the term “trusted partner” is a rare commodity between OSS providers and consumers for many different reasons (including trust from a security perspective, which is the most common pushback against using hosted OSS). Secondly, we haven’t unlocked the repeatability problem. Every organisation has different networks, different services, different processes, even different business models.
Cloud-hosted OSS represents a big opportunity into the future if we first focus on identification of the base ingredients of repeatability amongst all the disparity. Catalogs (eg service catalogs, product catalogs, virtual network device catalogs) are the closest we have so far. Intent abstraction models follow this theme too, as does platform-thinking / APIs. Where else?
Over the years, I’ve often referred to The Corkscrew Analogy or Momentum Spiral to describe a mindset of incremental improvement that’s needed to keep an
We’ve embarked on a journey of trying to plan for the future of OSS/BSS, not by predicting the future, but by seeking ways to be
As discussed in the previous article, “Future Scenario Planning: Have you given up on doing an OSS transformation? (part 1)” part of the fun of
Earlier in the week, a friend mentioned he was reading “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland. It’s not an OSS book per se, but does provide some
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.
