“I’ve been involved in telecom operations for decades, and I’ve learned that there is nothing in networking as inertial as OSS/BSS. A large minority of my experts (but still a minority) think that we should scrap the whole OSS/BSS model and simply integrate operations tasks with the service models of SDN and NFV orchestration. That’s possible too, and we’ll have to wait to see if there’s a sign that this more radical approach—which would really be event-driven—will end up the default path.”
Tom Nolle here.
Another thought-provoking article from Tom above. It’s worth clicking on the link for an extended read.
I agree with his assertion about OSS / BSS being inertial and designed against principles of the distant past.
I believe the glacial speed of change primarily comes down to one thing – variants.
Networks support lots of variants. Product offerings / bundles introduce more. Processes more still. Entwined best-of-breed integrations introduce yet more still. Etc. Now multiply these numbers and you get the number of variants that OSS need to handle.
That’s the number of variants that must be designed for, developed for, integrated / configured for, tested against, data migrated for, supported and handed over into ops… not to mention the defects that arise from overlooking variants or new variants being introduced with new networks, services, etc.
So whether it’s the old approach or a new event-driven approach, if we can collectively slash the number of variants, we can go a long way to reducing the entanglement.
My fear at the moment is that virtualised networks are going to add a vast number of new variants before anyone thinks of stripping any of the old ones out.
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to be introduced to a talented RAN automation expert. He’s one of Australia’s foremost, hands-on, experts on SON
I was listening to a group of telco experts on a podcast the other day. As they were talking, I kept picturing the image of
Earlier in the year, we wrote a series of articles about the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers and sellers (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4, pt5, pt6). “The chasm” is
Actually, maybe a few related questions. As you’ve seen from recent articles such as this, I’m increasingly interested in the cross-over worlds of comms and
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.
2 Responses
Hi Ryan, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head 🙂 The large cloud players know that controlling product variants is one of the keys to delivering fully integrated, customer facing management/orchestration stacks, which I tend to think they quietly understand is their most critical area of IP investment (interesting perhaps how they don’t talk about that one too much?!)
Great point Evan!
In fact it’s rolled into the follow-up article due to drop today!