The rise of non-traditional OSS

“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.”
Abraham Maslow.

B/OSS started out servicing only the biggest of telcos, starting with AT&T. Then they migrated to the smaller carriers, then ISPs and the march continues.

As electronic business and related digital communications are increasingly built into the business models of new companies, so is the need for OSS to evolve into strains that support non-traditional customer groups and their specific needs.

In highly generalistic terms:

• Telcos sell standardised consumable services (eg telephony, data links, SMS, etc) to many different customers.
• Data centres have a need to on-sell slices of physical and/or virtual assets as hosted services so their needs revolve around managing those infrastructure slices for many customers.
• Utilities tend to be built around managing the internal needs of the organisation more so than having many retail customers and are often reliant on spatial contexts on their comms assets.
• Enterprise customers want to control their own destiny with regards to the reliability of the comms infrastructure that underpins their business.
• Content providers want to streamline the delivery of their content to their customers via streaming communications networks.
• Etc

Each of these different customer groups have different objectives, needs and price points. Each are developing more sophisticated expectations from their B/OSS. From this evolution, additional product niches are appearing for OSS vendors.