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Another Newbie – NGOSS Harmonization
In contrast, another new program, NGOSS Harmonization, seems somewhat too narrowly defined. Rather than re-visiting, for today’s technology and market, the once unified vision of TNA, SID, eTOM, TAM, and adding back Infrastructure services, this team’s work plan is to balance contract definition with the SID. In seven years there still is no fixed definition of “Contract” and it seems much of the membership prefers this. While this is not a re-casting of the Red Team, our advice to this team is “aim higher and strive for larger and more useful goals.”
Executive Master Class
The Executive Master Class corralled the likely spenders into one room for four hours with Keith Willets, Robert Rich, and Colin Orviss. The session was well-attended with service providers turning up from the US, Europe, China, India and the Middle East. These sessions are interactive with free participation amongst the group. Keith laid out the tone of these discussions, but Rob’s presentation was the most informative with plenty of analysis from several sources. The naming of the Over-the-Top innovators along with their penetration and growth rates was informative, describing their size and demographic of their users - just who they are, who the advertisers are, and how much everyone is spending. This Executive session gets nearly universal good buzz from those that attend, and the outsider must marvel at the way this team works the crowd like coordinated sheepdogs.
This session is also a good indicator of industry executive sentiment. Asked to discuss several models for the future of telecom (see Buying Telecom Futures published March 2007 in Pipeline), the general consensus was that “Telecom is in the service-enabling business” best described where this group considered the industry was heading. Telcos are in the commerce-enabling business today and the view was that this would continue: most participants seemed to feel that telco/cablecos would, ultimately, not be the biggest players in the retail services business. One could argue that this sounds an awful lot like bit-pushing is a good thing after all. If representative of executive sentiment throughout the global industry, this is a significant change in attitude compared to a couple of years ago.
The Sessions
As usual, the TMF staff and their on-floor conference management hires did a fantastic job of running a smooth, nearly trouble free conference, but the overall conference material was not so clear or well messaged.
There was some good news. An excellent example of exchange of information in a
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If representative of executive sentiment throughout the global industry, this is a significant change in attitude compared to a couple of years ago. |
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conference session was the presentation by Martin Huddleston of QinetiQ. It seems that FineGrain NGOSS is alive and advancing but not in service providers; instead it looks to be enabling the interconnection of the various NATO networks and services.
Many service providers are still committed to transformation using NGOSS or Prosspero with SOA technologies, including AT&T, Verizon, BT, and Vodaphone. An informative session presented by cable companies underlined the value of NGOSS principles in evolving service provider architectures, but at the same time suggested that COTS applications still don’t deliver what TMF conceived all those years ago. BT is committed to a component architecture which groups sub-assemblies into reusable “platforms.” AT&T is following a “culture of architecture”: they call their approach CARTS - Common Architecture for Real-Time Services. Planning is intended to control all parts of the delivery life-cycle: plans go from the abstract architectural ideal, to the implementation plan with on-the-ground systems, to the project plans that incorporate political compromises.
Convergys cogently returned call centers to the attention of the TMF. Contact Centers need to be re-purposed with the new technology of SOA and enabled with collaborative NGOSS approaches. As Contact Centers change from a focus on efficiency to effectiveness, they need new tools and business models, which are areas the TMF could take up, but it was also pointed out that individual consumer spending on mobile phones, home connectivity and on media content has remained steady for several years – so what is the incentive for operators to invest in significant change?
Both Amdocs and Oracle declared (at last) that they will be re-engineering their product suites along NGOSS lines. Good news. Tal Givoly, Chief Scientist of Amdocs continues to have a good grasp of where the industry is, what is threatening it, and where it can go with Web 2.0 – but one wonders if his vision will end up anywhere in the actual offerings of this mega-vendor.
In fact, 2007 was mostly the year of the mega-vendor. There was a clear message from the service providers that they were investing in just a few big SI and OSS/BSS vendors – preferring “efficiency to differentiation,” but given the mixed project delivery results, it is hard to demonstrate that big equals “efficiency.” So, are these
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