VENDORS LOOK BEYOND LEAN AT TELEMANAGEMENT WORLD

AT&T, BT, Italia portend mass legacy retirement

North American operations support system vendors looking for the spark that will ignite their sector received some good news at last week's TeleManagement World conference. Senior executives from several carriers told of plans to retire their legacy OSS systems, which should result in a corresponding spending boost.

Keynote speaker Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T's CTO, CIO and president of AT&T Labs, kicked off the conference with a view of the carrier's future, which focused on an application-aware network that is self-provisioning, self-maintaining and self-restorable. It is based on global IP MPLS and will be built using the framework and standards of the TMF's New Generation Operations Support Systems and Software (NGOSS).

Eslambolchi whetted the appetite of the OSS community by saying AT&T would retire 130 legacy systems next year and 320 by 2005.

“Ninety-five percent of our legacy systems will be retired by then and replaced with Web services,” he said. “The battleground of the 21st century will be software for e-services, CRM, end-to-end flow through, capacity management, supply chain management and more.”

Eslambolchi's endorsement of NGOSS was one of several from a cast of C-level executives—representing three service providers and the industry's largest supplier—that furthered public recognition of NGOSS and acceptance of its open, standards-based approach to OSS.

There was more evidence the industry is headed toward the TMF's concept of the lean operator. BT Group CTO Matthew Bross announced the company would begin to retire its 700 core legacy systems. “We are cutting loose of legacy at BT,” he said.

BT's legacy retirement is part of its end game to become what Bross called a high-velocity organization. “You can't save your way to success in this business,” he said. “Making it easier to buy and use services requires an industry shift.”

That shift is toward the common framework of NGOSS. “We have made our decisions based on NGOSS, Bross said.

Telecom Italia, which won the TMF's Operational Excellence Award for its DSL flow-through provisioning system, also sang the praises of NGOSS. The carrier also congratulated software vendors Granite Systems, Micromuse, TIBCO and Syndesis, all of which helped it implement the systems that earned the award.

“We had to improve our service portfolio and reduce opex. It was important to have new processes in place to move to our new-generation OSS,” said Stefano Pileri, director of Telecom Italia's domestic wireline network.

Pileri said Telecom Italia reduced operational expenses by 19% from 2001 to 2002 and by 13% from 2002 to 2003. Another 14% reduction is expected from 2003 to 2004.

“This is a validation of the strategy we took two years ago with our Xng platform. It was the culmination of two years of intense work and close partnerships,” said Granite CEO John Borden.

While the concept of the lean operator is correct and necessary for today's economy, Telcordia CEO Matt Desch said it is not enough. “When the downturn came, everyone just stopped,” he said. “That may have helped make the budget in 2000 and 2001, but now people are moving on.”

Desch said that historically, his company was encouraged by service providers to do a lot of one-off projects.

“That's just too much customization,” he said. “It's a hidden tax on the industry that we will have to wean ourselves from.”