Looking back, I now consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with an amazing product on the first OSS project I worked on (all the way back in 2000). And I say amazing because the underlying data models and core product architecture are still better than any other I’ve worked with in the two decades since. The core is the most elegant, simple and powerful I’ve seen to date. Most importantly, the models were designed to cope with any technology, product or service variant that could be modelled as a hierarchy, whether physical or virtual / logical. I never found a technology that couldn’t be modelled into the core product and it required no special overlays to implement a new network model. Sadly, the company no longer exists and the product is languishing on the books of the company that bought out the assets but isn’t leveraging them.
Having been so spoilt on the first assignment, I’ve been slightly underwhelmed by the level of elegant innovation I’ve observed in OSS since. That’s possibly part of the reason for the OSS Call for Innovation published late last year. There have been many exciting innovations introduced since, but many modern tools are still more complex and complicated than they should be, for implementers and operators alike.
But during a product demo last week, I was blown away by an innovation that was so simple in concept, yet so powerful that it is probably the single most impressive innovation I’ve seen since that first OSS. Like any new elegant solution, it left me wondering why it hasn’t been thought of previously. You’re probably wondering what it is. Well first let me start by explaining the problem that it seeks to overcome.
Many inventory-based OSS rely on highly structured and hierarchical data. This is a double-edged sword. Significant inter-relationship of data increases the insight generation opportunities, but the downside is that it can be immensely challenging to get the data right (and to maintain a high-quality data state). Limited data inter-relationships make the project easier to implement, but tend to allow less rich data analyses. In particular, connectivity data (eg circuits, cables, bearers, VPNs, etc) can be a massive challenge because it requires the linking of separate silos of data, often with no linking key. In fact, the data quality problem was probably one of the most significant root-causes of the demise of my first OSS client.
Now getting back to the present. The product feature that blew me away was the first I’ve seen that allows significant inter-relationship of data (yet in a simple data model), but still copes with poor data quality. Let’s say your OSS has a hierarchical data model that comprises Location, Rack, Equipment, Card, Port (or similar) and you have to make a connection from one device’s port to another’s. In most cases, you have to build up the whole pyramid of data perfectly for each device before you can create a customer connection between them. Let’s also say that for one device you have a full pyramid of perfect data, but for the other end, you only know the location.
The simple feature is to connect a port to a location now, or any other point to point on the hierarchy (and clean up the far-end data later on if you wish). It also allows the intermediate hops on the route to be connected at any point in the hierarchy. That’s too simple right, yet most inventory tools don’t allow connections to be made between different levels of their hierarchies. For implementers, data migration / creation / cleansing gets a whole lot simpler with this approach. But what’s even more impressive is that the solution then assigns a data quality ranking to the data that’s just been created. The quality ranking is subsequently considered by tools such as circuit design / routing, impact analysis, etc.
However, you’ll have noted that the data quality issue still hasn’t been fixed. That’s correct, so this product then provides the tools that show where quality rankings are lower, thus allowing remediation activities to be prioritised.
If you have an inventory data quality challenge and / or are wondering the name of this product, it’s CROSS, from the team at CROSS Network Intelligence (www.cross-ni.com).
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What is the name of the first OSS product that you were mentioning you worked in the early 2000s?