“Seriously, we are in the midst of the convergence of voice and data and that is challenging the infrastructure of the telephone companies. There are huge commercial interests in the basic technology, but even more so in content delivery and control of content.”
Steve Crocker.
It is a commonly held belief that telecommunications technologies and IT technologies are converging. It would be true to say that. However, it seems that it’s more of a takeover by IT than a merger.
It is the millions of corporate/enterprise customers that are more comfortable with the IT paradigms, that have thrust IT technologies onto CSPs. These technologies include Ethernet, ITSM, ITIL, etc.
There are only a handful of attributes from Telco networks that are being driven back into IT, including high reliability (eg 99.9% and above) (eg QoS, HA/DR topologies, etc) and wide-spread geographical coverage.
So, that also tends to point to the trends for your future OSS requirements.
Start (or continue) looking towards the needs and technologies of enterprise because future OSS will need to be built around their tenets. OSS that were originally designed for traditional Telco technologies may continue to be patched but will ultimately be exposed when compared with tools that were inherently designed to support the IT world (ie packet-switched networks, ITSM, ITIL, etc.)