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Clearly commercial companies only contribute as developers if there is some way in which they can benefit as users or vendors too.
Who’s In?
Who are the likely players? Let’s look at the big incumbent phone companies first. Is there a business need? Perhaps - because the integration tax applies to everyone. But the big phone companies mostly have their support environments in place and they have solid relationships with the big systems vendors. And the big incumbents have other things to worry about just now that are probably perceived to be more important than collaborating in the OSS/BSS space. Furthermore, with aggressive cost cutting in recent years, many of the people that telcos used to employ to build their in-house applications have retired, or have left to work in other industries, or for some, their own Support System COTS companies. Of all possible interested parties, the big phone companies right now have minimal business pressure to participate in open source, and negligible ability to contribute in any case.
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The most successful open source products could trickle into the big incumbents, for niche applications. |
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a meaningful contribution. There is a question though: can they do this before they are absorbed by one of the giants?
And how about the COTS companies? Will they rush to donate their code to an open-source .org for the better good of the industry? Probably no more enthusiastically than they rushed to fragment their applications into tiny functional modules, a la NGOSS, so that telcos could pick and choose the chunks they liked best. (This is not a criticism – they do what they believe makes sense for their businesses.) Although many vendors make more money from professional services and support than they do from licenses, it is the tied-in nature of the product that enables these sustainable revenues – and reduces competitive pressures. So it is unlikely they will be prime movers in the creation of open source products. But if someone else gets the ball rolling, they might
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Small and medium-tier phone companies, wireless and wireline, are in a slightly different place. Many of these companies still have gaps in their OSS/BSS application suite. Sometimes it still looks more economical to use a few people to do something than to buy a commercial product. Some of these companies still have a handful of in-house developers, supporting home-grown applications that have been around for years. Many smaller telcos are desperately in need of modernization, but are finding it difficult to find the funds to do the job using commercial products. Furthermore these companies have a tradition of collaboration with each other – they club together to get bigger discounts from equipment vendors, for example. They have joint marketing programs, to share costs. They meet to discuss regulation and legal matters. So here, there is a more evident business driver, and these companies, collectively, have resources that could provide |
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find it expedient to contribute in niche areas in due course. They certainly have the capabilities.
Another possibility is the community of over-the-top service providers. Many of these companies already have strong development teams and some already sponsor open source. Google (to name the obvious one) is already a heavy user and contributor. Android is a telecom application open source project, albeit at the edge. OTT services, including voice and video, are just applications. Managing these services, and billing for them are just more applications that can sit in the cloud as readily as on a local server. Will these companies be interested? If net neutrality legislation opens the field to all-comers to provide competitive communications, it seems likely that this community will look at open source as a viable option for managing and
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