By
Barbara Lancaster
“In the Beginning…”
Some history for our younger readers: once upon a time, the information systems used by all businesses, including phone companies, were card indexes. That’s right, made from trees. Then smart people began to seize the idea that those new-fangled computers might help us organize our data and run our businesses more effectively. With no commercial products out there to buy to do the job, we built our own. Card records were replaced with mass electronic storage. Each department worked independently with the IT department to automate parts of the business processes it controlled. By today’s standards these systems were klutzy but they represented a great leap forward conceptually. Back then, thirty or forty years ago, the only people who knew anything about telco OSS/BSS worked in the phone companies.
In due course, telco competition appeared on the scene. This created a large number of new telcos and a real market for software that could be used to run these companies. Some telco specialists saw the opportunity to start up their own OSS/BSS enterprises, taking their passion and expertise to the wider market. Some telcos floated off their IT development departments to service this new market. The commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) market was born.
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The integration tax is still very much an expensive reality. |
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described the high cost of making commercial applications work with each other as the “Integration Tax” and rallied TMForum members to move towards small, business function-aware applications that could share a common foundation of data, security and housekeeping tools, thereby dramatically reducing costs and increasing flexibility. A few telcos and vendors have tried to work towards the flexibility and lower cost of ownership that could be achieved by following the NGOSS principles. However, for the significant majority of telcos, the integration tax is still very much an expensive reality.
More recently, SOA, along with streamlined integration and data exchange supported by
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Even with the lower cost that packaged OSS/BSS applications offer over individual hand crafted systems (and even agreeing that even the most monolithic of hand crafted systems affords better productivity than manual everything), the cost of building and running this type of computing environment is widely perceived as too high. This is painfully obvious when set against the pressure on profit margins created by increased competition. Yet, this is the status quo, despite the fact that for at least fifteen years, the industry has sought a better way. Keith Willetts, at the TMForum, has long |
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things like XML and SOAP, promised to enable that break up of monolithic systems tied together too tightly. We are seeing some case studies indicating that cost savings are being achieved. Yet there is another approach that a few telcos are investigating that might tackle this issue from a rather different direction: open source.
Now Open
Open source has a credible presence in many areas that are not light years away from the needs of phone companies. In many business
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