There’s Consolidation, and There’s Consolidation

By Robert Curran, Cramer Systems

Editor's Note: In gathering responses to questions distributed to a range of vendors, Pipeline received a compelling letter from Cramer Systems' director of global marketing Robert Curran.. We felt that Curran's perspective on how development – and not consolidation – is the key to solving carrier's major problems was worth sharing with our readers.

The current "wave of consolidation" – though there's no such thing, of course - in the telecom software sector is not being driven by a response to carriers' major issues. It is being driven as a defensive play by larger vendors or a survival strategy for smaller ones. For example, Telcordia's acquisition of Granite Systems was stated at the time to be about accessing new revenue opportunities, not specifically about solving customers' problems in a better way. In fact, Telcordia's Elementive strategy is visibly and by definition about offering as wide as possible a range of component products. I don't believe it's inaccurate to characterize this as a "bag of bits" approach to OSS . ( Ed.Note – To Telcordia's credit, the Elementive strategy is intended – at least in concept – to overcome challenges like the integration tax. Curran's assessment, however, is not wholly inaccurate, but it represents one specific point of view).

Metsolv's historical aggregation of components a few years back was likewise a way to broaden a portfolio of products - but again, has not changed how Metasolv attempted technically to address the real, bigger issues for service providers in OSS , such as BSS/OSS integration and the integration tax, generally. Let's also not forget that a consolidation of sorts was attempted by the equipment vendors not many years ago, and that strategy demonstrably failed.

So "consolidation" as it actually is expressed today is a political or commercial one, and thus far has little to do with service providers' needs. It's more like "own as many pieces of the puzzle as you can". The trouble is that the overall picture has not been painted first, and that is what lets service providers down. Even if the pieces fit - and everyone already understands how expensive it can be to try to fuse two totally separate product lines - the resulting picture will not be a thing of beauty and simplicity.

This, incidentally, helps explain why OSS vendors have, on the whole, been spectacularly unsuccessful at replacing the big systems built by Tier 1 telcos. There are many smaller in-house systems built, and these have been nibbled away at by commercial vendors, but the big systems have remained like a citadel, impregnable, and no amount of rearranging the pieces or company names on a "bag of bits" is going to change that.

However, it's important to talk about another kind of consolidation that is also happening in the marketplace. The consolidation of the overall vision for how OSS , and a telco, can best operate - the "thing of beauty and simplicity" I referred to earlier; a "grand design" if you like. This is the consolidation the industry actually needs because it can and does address the "big issues" - namely, how do we run our business and operations cost effectively and deliver high-quality customer experience without creating a systems estate that is unbelievably complex, expensive and difficult to manage?

That consolidated vision is radically different to the history of how commercial OSS has developed to date, and has a lot more in common with the rise of enterprise software applications such as SAP and Siebel. Cramer believes that a commercially available, integrated solution based on a consolidated architectural vision is what service providers need and want - and we would point to our growing success as evidence for the demand, particularly among Tier1 carriers.

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