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Indeed, in the widget world, taking the time for software quality and user acceptance testing is a business recipe for suicide. The user community is the test bed. Developers get their application out in front of users first, and then fix it later, and if it is successful, scale it later. J-Squared Media delivered its first product widget, a Sticky Note application, onto the Facebook environment only a week after Facebook opened up its API to third-party developers. Instead of quality control, these developers rely on social network discussion groups where users directly post praises, problems, and wish lists. This is NPI turned on its head! This is totally alien to the IT departments of traditional service providers. Ironically, though, it is familiar to service provider Operations Groups.
NOCs have long had an underground tradition of cobbling together scripts and tools to rapidly fill the gaps in management and customer service left by bloated, overdue, or ill-designed management applications. (Indeed, the first Frame Relay performance report was generated by an MCI operations team to answer a customer’s skepticism on the flow of traffic over a recently turned up circuit.) If we enable the NOCs with the same platforms and tools the widget developer community has, can we accelerate management development? But who will be the test/feedback community? And can service providers ever afford to fail at such a “tossed over the fence” application?
Open Source platforms are also becoming a real thorn, or potential opportunity, for traditional service providers and network/service management. Google is plowing ground here with two recent announced platforms: OpenSocial for developing widgets and an open source mobile operating system, AndroidPhone. Wide acceptance occurred for OpenSocial (even Facebook supports it) and we can expect similar wide acceptance of AndroidPhone. Open source provides a distributed test environment where rapid widget (and agent) development can undergo quality review and subsequent tuning, but using this approach means service providers must “give up intellectual property” to competitors in order to get back tested, improved applications. Let’s start this process by calling this “collaboratively sharing intellectual property” instead of “giving it away.”
What these widgets and open source platforms currently lack is an enforceable, embedded management model. NGOSS (at least Finegrain NGOSS) championed the idea of every service/application/component having not just a known service interface, but also a standard management interface. Yes, NGOSS services are supposed to all be instrumented. If such deployment and management interfaces become a standard, predictable part of all OTT services, then the
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Open Source platforms are also becoming a real thorn, or potential opportunity, for traditional service providers and network/service management. |
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opportunity exists to manage not just them, but to tune networks based on their use and distribution. This means extending the notion of “Governance,” now a normal part of SOA, ESB, and Grid platforms, to OTT services. Yet can this happen in this “wild west” environment?
Net Neutrality vs. the Walled Garden
Traditionally service providers have attempted to maintain a walled garden of services and devices. The US mobile operators are a notorious example today with their policy of “locking” phones to networks, but Apple has turned this model back against the mobile operators themselves in seeking to direct all services and management of the iPhone back to Apple – even to permanently disabling phones that break “locked” arrangements. Walled gardens allow for billing by service and by device. It also provides for a “captured” customer. Unfortunately, most users hate being limited by walled gardens.
It is easy to become alarmist in the face of the geometric increase in the rise of OTT services. ‘Increasingly, the relationship between revenue, investment, and bandwidth utilization is eroding…. OTT services can engender either unprecedented network contention or massive infrastructure costs with no offsetting increase in revenue.” [Barry Hardek, Vice President of Marketing & Sales, CableMatrix in TelephonyWorld] So, can and should operators act to throttle or suppress the growth of OTT services?
Vint Cerf has stated, "The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. A lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive."Network neutrality maintains that networks carrying broadband or IP traffic shall be free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, the types of communication allowed, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by owners of the underlying infrastructure. As IP was developed by the government, there is a sound legal basis for such requests.
However, critics argue that ‘net neutrality’ potentially reduces incentives to build and upgrade networks and launch new network resident services. Basically, the network owners must receive compensation for building and maintaining the network - or market forces (not allowing for altruism) will punish these companies and perhaps drive
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