OSS come in all shapes and sizes

As the OSS vendors / suppliers page here on PAOSS shows, there are a LOT of different OSS options, making it an extremely fragmented market. But there’s something of a reason for that fragmentation – customer requirements for OSS come in all shapes and sizes. Here are four of the major categories that I’ve been lucky enough to work on.

Tier 1 telcos – the OSS of these organisations tend to be best classified as having to cope with scale. Scale comes in multiple dimensions. The number of network devices under management tend to be large, as do the types of device. The number of subscribers and customer services tend to be large, not to mention having large amounts of change occurring on a daily basis. The number of process variants and system integrations also tend to be large. And being at scale means that they’re more likely to be able to justify the cost of customisations and automations – either to off-the-shelf products or via purpose-built tools. Budgets, both CAPEX and OPEX, also tend to be large. Except where niche slices of the total OSS suite are being delivered, the vendors that service this market are also large in terms of revenues, but also in their number of services staff available to service the customer’s unique needs. In the case of the telco, the business (and revenue model) is built around the network so it gets the clear attention of the organisation’s executives.

Enterprise customers – these OSS tend to be at the other end of the spectrum, even when the enterprise is large (eg banks). Networks tend to be more homogeneous, being IT/IP-centric. Services tend to be less customer-specific (ie for journaling costs at a business unit level rather than individual subscribers) but follow ITSM process models, so the service management daily delta is not at the same scale as the Tier 1 telco. For enterprise customers, the network is rarely core business, even if it is mission-critical to the business. As such, attention and budgets tend to be much smaller. In turn, this means that the smaller, self-service or open-source OSS products / suppliers tend to be present in this segment.

Then there are two categories of organisation that fit between the two previous ends of the spectrum:

Tier 2/3 telcos, MVNOs and data centres – Similar to the Tier-1 telco, just not at the same scale, which has implications on the nature of their OSS. They generally need all the same types of OSS tools as the T1s, just not catering for the same number of variants. Due to cost constraints, there may be one or a few significant OSS building blocks such as inventory, assurance or orchestration, but often there will also be enterprise-grade and/or open-source products in their OSS stack. CAPEX and OPEX budgets are smaller, so clever jack-of-all-trades OSS experts are often on the operational teams delivering sophisticated solutions on shoe-string budgets. Some of the best OSS experts I’ve come across can trace their roots back to these origins.

Utilities – the OSS of these organisations are a fascinating mix of the first two categories above because enterprise-grade OSS often aren’t really fit-for-purpose and carrier-grade OSS doesn’t quite suit either. Except in the case of multi-utilities (eg power + telco), these organisations tend to have very little service management change, mainly because they tend to have few to no external customers. This makes them similar to enterprise OSS. But like telcos, they often have networks that are more varied than your typical IT/IP-centric networks under management in enterprise-land. They often have less common network topologies and protocols, including older and even proprietary models that enterprise-grade OSS rarely support without expensive mediation. Just like the enterprise, the telco network (and hence the OSS) of a utility is not core business and can’t be justified through driving incremental revenues. However, it is generally mission-critical to the core business (eg tele-protection circuits are in place to ensure resilience of the electricity supply across the power network). As such, telco Network health / reliability and asset management tend to be the main focus of these OSS. And whereas telcos can delegate some responsibility for network security to their customers (using the dumb-pipe excuse), utilities bear full responsibility for the security of their telco networks and the critical infrastructure that these networks and OSS tools support.

These are only broadly general categories and there are more than 50 shades of grey in between. Are there any other broad categories that you feel I’m missing?

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