Re-writing the Sales vs Networks cultural divide

“Brand, marketing, pricing and sales were seen as sexy. Networks and IT were the geeks no one seemed to speak to or care about. … This isolation and excommunication of our technical team had created an environment of disillusion. If you wanted something done the answer was mostly ‘No – we have no budget and no time for that’. Our marketing team knew more about loyalty points … than about our own key product, the telecommunications network.”
Olaf Swantee, from his book, “4G Mobile Revolution”

Great note here (picked up by James Crawshaw at Heavy Reading). It talks about the great divide that always seems to exist between Sales / Marketing and Network / Ops business units.

I’m really excited about the potential for next generation OSS / orchestration / NaaS (Network as a Service) architectures to narrow this divide though.

In this case:

1. The Network is offered as a microservice (let’s abstractly call them Resource Facing Services [RFS]);
2. Sales / Marketing construct customer offerings (let’s call them Customer Facing Services [CFS]) from those RFS; and
3. There’s a catalog / orchestration layer that marries the CFS with the cohesive set of RFS

The third layer becomes a meet-in-the-middle solution where Sales / Marketing comes together with Network / Ops – and where they can discuss what customers want and what the network can provide.

The RFS are suitably abstracted that Sales / Marketing doesn’t need to understand the network and complexity that sits behind the veil. Perhaps it’s time for Networks / Ops to shine, where the RFS can be almost as sexy as CFS (am I falling too far into the networks / geeky side of the divide?  🙂  )

The CFS are infinitely composable from RFS (within the constraints of the RFS that are available), allowing Sales / Marketing teams to build whatever they want and the Network / Ops teams don’t have to be constantly reacting to new customer offerings.

I wonder if this revolution will give Olaf cause to re-write this section of his book in a few years, or whether we’ll still have the same cultural divide despite the exciting new tools.