Among the drivers of this growth: the addition of wireless, packet-switched, all-optical, broadband and other services, spiced up with a rate of change that could hardly have been dreamed of in 1984, when Bellcore was established to keep all the regional Bells singing from the same operating hymnal.
"Networks of complexity really begin to put a strain on the OSS foundations" of traditional telecommunications companies, says Ron Ponder, who heads the telecom practice at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.
Ponder's colleague, Greg Douglass, who heads Cap Gemini's OSS practice in Dallas, sums up the problem more bluntly: "Their business is just cratering under the weight of these new services."
ROI
To speed return on their hefty network investments, service providers need to be able to add new services quickly--without spending a ton of money or alienating the customer in the process.
"They need to get to higher-value services in order to differentiate themselves," says Martin Steinmann, vice president of marketing with Syndesis, a fulfillment systems vendor based in Toronto. "Services are very complex to deliver in a cost-effective manner. Moving up the value chain is a huge challenge for service providers."
OSS software that works well is an essential part of the equation. It can streamline order entry, provisioning, quality control, inventory and network management, and other processes.
Interoperability testing to prove incumbent carriers' readiness to compete in the local loop has put an unusual spotlight on one aspect of the OSS world: connecting traditional carriers to competitors. But others will take centre stage as all-optical networking grows in importance.
"I spent many years as a [chief information officer]," Ponder says. "Oftentimes, those CIOs are guilty of spending a lot of their money on sophisticated billing systems or their networks, and overlooking the OSS, or taking it for granted. It just sort of existed in the back room."
No more.
A new back office
Perhaps the biggest change agent in the operational support area is the industry's gradual migration onto Internet Protocol (IP) and all-optical networks.
According to those in the industry, traditional OSS approaches fail because they're based on a point-to-point, circuit-switched network, rather than a mesh architecture that collects and distributes packets. To provide the data, network management and service levels that companies expect, these systems must gather information from many different directions and make it look seamless to the end user.
What Communications Industry Researchers analyst Lawrence Gasman calls "the Nimble Network" will require much closer attention to software.
"The whole issue of OSS and network management really needs to be reexamined in the light of optics," he says. Legacy OSS were engineered to run voice over copper, not packets over fibre, in an era where cost control was less important than building a network for the ages, Gasman says. "As the transport layer changes to the new designs, the old OSS designs become less and less relevant."
New designs will focus on making the most of assets: fibre inventory, bandwidth and guaranteed service levels. In a speech at the 2001 Optical Fiber Communication Conference last March, Gasman predicted that optical performance management software will become the second-largest segment of the OSS market, behind provisioning products for the all-optical network.
Provisioning products will remain the largest segment, growing from US$500 million in sales in 2001 to about $825 million in 2004, according to research by CIR. But performance management will see robust growth as service providers use the tools to create and monitor service level agreements and check the health of their networks.
Other software categories, such as fault management, network planning, inventory and billing, will grow as well, Gasman says. "Network nimbleness is almost synonymous with software."
Much of the blame for the apparent disarray in OSS has been laid at the feet of legacy systems. Many OSS applications shipped with hardware, leaving integrators to patch a dozen apps together along with a dozen network components. And hardware companies often aren't the best developers of software applications.
"That's really what slowed down Telcordia [Technologies]," Douglass says. "It got too big and unmanageable, and it couldn't be flexible."
Telcordia--formerly Bellcore--was created as part of the mid-'80s Bell breakup to ensure common network standards across the newly independent regional Bells. These days, at Telcordia headquarters, engineers are labouring to prove that old dogs can learn new tricks.
Telcordia, which was purchased by Science Applications International in 1997, inherited Bellcore's legacy: big, profitable, first-tier customers based on big, old, circuit-switched networks. "Cherished systems," Chief Architect Mark Effinger calls them. "'Legacy' carries with it a certain negative connotation."
The positives: The regional Bells operate the world's most efficient telecommunications systems, they're hungry to add next-generation services and they have plenty of cash flow and customers.
Effinger says Telcordia's not suffering from the demise of many new-generation carriers because they were never Telcordia's prospects in the first place. "They weren't focused on operational efficiency. They were just dressing up for Wall Street."
The risk, Effinger says, remains the inadvertent--or unavoidable--creation of "silos" of network management and support.
"You won't hear Telcordia announce our all-optical OSS," Effinger predicts. Instead, the company will continue its current strategy of adding managed IP solutions on top of its existing capabilities, recognising that smart networks can handle some back office tasks themselves instead of delegating them to an OSS. Two such products are scheduled for release this year.
"You cannot possibly afford to patchwork," he says. "It just breaks down."
