Good News for OSS and Enterprise Software Vendors? (cont'd)

The consequence is that today many Service Providers find themselves running a sub-optimal infrastructure with very high maintenance costs. Each application adds significant overhead, bringing its own database, security, housekeeping, and recovery requirements. Each has its own release schedule for software upgrades, forcing the service provider into a very costly and almost continuous cycle of regression testing, staff training, and platform upgrades. With OSS infrastructure and associated services spending climbing to more than $US 20 billion by 2000, the crippling costs of getting the pieces together and keeping them together, were beginning to hurt Incumbents, as well as CLECs and their shareholders. The unforeseen cost and complexity of the "best in breed" COTS OSS infrastructure contributed to the downfall of more than one CLEC.

Into this chaos, the TeleManagement Forum (a group initially funded and led by the major global carriers) stepped in with its New Generation OSS proposal. NGOSS sets out a very logical solution. It begins with a description of the key business functions which every service provider must perform. These common business processes provide a means to begin to sort out the overlaps and gaps in the applications built by the ISVs. Service Providers would be able to see at a glance exactly which business processes a specific COTS application supports, and which it doesn't. NGOSS proposes an infrastructure framework where all common functions (security, housekeeping, message queuing, data structures, etc.) would reside, dramatically reducing the overhead currently caused by the replication of all of these common functions within each COTS application. By stripping out the common IT management elements from the COTS application, NGOSS makes possible the Business Aware Component (BAC) - a small, nimble application focused only on performing its business task, able to plug into the Framework for its management and to interact with other BACs.

While NGOSS sounds like (and in fact is) a very reasonable solution to a very real problem, Service Providers are no closer to being able to purchase the Framework or a BAC than when the concept was launched. There are many reasons why the NGOSS initiative seems stalled. First, a BAC would be much smaller, and therefore less expensive than a full blown stand-alone capable application. Instead of paying $500K or more for an application license for an inventory system; service providers would expect to pay $50K. Not necessarily an appealing prospect to the current group of OSS vendors or their shareholders. Secondly, no ISV can risk stripping out all of the application management elements before there is a Framework available to plug into. Thirdly, no one has stepped up to build the Framework, since there are no BACs to use it (the classic chicken-and-egg situation). Lastly, the Systems Integrators are understandably not in a hurry to solve the "problem" of very expensive integration projects and continuous upgrade projects.

Real Progress in IT Solutions Designed for Enterprise

While the telecommunications market is very large (approaching $US 1 trillion in annual revenues), and does have special needs, it is not large enough nor specialized enough to remain insulated from improvements in the IT industry in general. Innovations such as Web Services, Identity Management, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Business Process Automation are promising to reshape the capabilities and flexibilities of large enterprises on a global scale across all industries. These new enterprise solutions are themselves the result of the painful experiences many corporations have suffered in attempting to implement complex and disruptive ERP projects. The availability of generic corporate-wide frameworks appears to make real many of the concepts envisioned by NGOSS.

For example, Identity Management or Identity Provisioning systems enable corporations to efficiently manage each stage of an employee's tenure. Management of a new employee from initial job offer, assignment of office space, phone features, computing needs, and information access rights and authorities can all be tied to the corporate LDAP. This sets the stage for SOX compliant tracking and reporting, as well as making it possible for comprehensive cancellation of all access privileges immediately upon termination of employment. Companies in the Identity Management space include:

Service Oriented Architectures, show a great deal of promise when applied to solving the OSS woes of Service Providers. Companies can choose to define and implement "chunks" of capability, focused on a specific area of their business, unlike ERP systems which as their name suggests, require an Enterprise-wide commitment to adopt the same tools at the same time. A Service Provider could apply a SOA solution to establish the common Information level system and then add Application level components one at a time, eventually connecting all of its operating business functions accurately to its important corporate data.

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