I want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge

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?

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