OSS everywhere

OSS is an acronym that is increasingly becoming important to network management - not only for service providers, but also for enterprise IT managers.

Operational Support System is a term originally coined by telephone companies to describe the computer systems used to provision, bill, manage and inventory telephone-related products and services. Over time, the basic automation was linked into other functions, like customer relationship management and workforce administration. Since these systems evolved from early enterprise automation, they generally are very complex, very customized and written in largely obsolete code. Without the dynamics of convergence and the deregulation of telephone networks, this state of affairs conceivably might have lasted for a hundred years.

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Convergence - the melding of voice, video and data - has forced conventional telephone companies to think in terms of an entirely new paradigm, one of logical services based on packet-switched data streams. Likewise, convergence is forcing data service providers to think in terms of providing services to potentially millions of customers - orders of magnitude more than they traditionally have targeted.

Deregulation has accelerated this dynamic. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 effectively opened up local telephone networks to competition. It did this by unbundling the network into discrete elements that the telephone companies now have to provide on a wholesale basis to competitive entrants. Instantly, the potential inventory that telephone companies had to manage expanded a hundred-fold. Plus, the FCC has mandated that the telephone companies must also provide access to their existing OSSes to competing carriers. These systems, which are barely capable of supporting a single company, must now support many, in a secure way, and at the same time address an inventory that is considerably larger than they were originally designed to handle.

OSSs therefore have become something of a hot topic to both telephone companies and regulators.

This would seem to be an ideal opportunity for network management vendors in the data realm. There are several problems with using their products, however. First is the enormous scale of the telephone networks. While many network management systems claim high scalability, usually this has only been verified to the 100,000-node level. To contrast, one medium-sized local telephone provider has over 16 million lines supported. Each line is a potential delivery channel for data services.

In spite of the potential roadblocks, OSSes is becoming the Holy Grail of enterprise automation. The idea that networks will be managed as an integral part of the business, whether telephone company or enterprise, has become a mainstream concept.

Vendors such as Evidian and Agilent are taking a hard look at OSS products and are moving to address the needs of major carriers. Likewise, vendors that provide point products for such functions as provisioning and inventory management (IP Highway and Visionael) are beginning to look at partnership arrangements to build OSS suites.

You can see that OSS concepts are being applied to enterprises if you look at the recent coining of the Business Support Solutions (BSS) label. The concept here is precisely the same as OSS, except the focus is on traditional business. So, for the IT manager who had begun to think of management software as a mature market, it is once again time to dust off the brain cells. Management solutions are about to reach for a new level of ubiquity; the new-old word is OSS.

This impending transformation not only affects service providers - it also holds significant ramifications for enterprise IT. If you're an enterprise shop, look for accelerated improvements in management software that you might have written off in the past. And if you're looking for managed services, it's time to open the hood and look at the changes going on within your service provider ecosystem. Your choices are becoming richer, but it's up to you to sort them out.

Dennis Drogseth is a director with Enterprise Management Associates, a leading analyst and market research firm based in Boulder, Colorado, focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Dennis has extensive experience in network management platforms and products and is researching trends in management software and changing IT roles internationally. His 18-plus years of experience in high-tech includes positions at IBM and Cabletron. He has been quoted in the press and is a speaker at industry events. He can be reached via e-mail.

Audrey Rasmussen is a research director with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Audrey has more than 20 years of experience working with distributed systems, applications and networks. Her current focus at EMA is e-business, SMB/SME and MSPs. She can be reached via e-mail.

Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, is a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management software and services.

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