From dance floor to mosh pit

It's not only the number of dancers crowding the floor of the OSS ballroom that is surprising - it's their girth. The biggest names in telecom equipment seem to have suddenly found the software beat.

The operations support system (OSS) tune that has them swinging may be the latest craze, but it certainly is no fad. As long as there have been telcos, there have been back-office support systems. But there haven't always been competitive telcos, and that is the market the big players are after.

Companies such as ADC Telecommunications, Harris and Lucent Technologies have recently introduced integrated product strategies that exploit the acquisitions each has made and the technologies they have produced in the OSS space. Others poised to provide comprehensive OSS solutions include Alcatel, Nortel Networks and, on a different level, Cisco Systems.

In the past few years, most of these companies have been building comprehensive OSSs largely through acquisitions. What they haven't bought or built, they have added through partnerships with niche suppliers.

Now that these companies are ready to offer complete solutions, questions linger. Will emerging carriers be willing to turn to their primary equipment providers for their back-office and management solutions? Will they relinquish control of their networks to a single vendor? Can they afford it?

Some experts say - and the market may dictate - that the answer for competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) is a collective "yes."

"The financial pressures on CLECs are great enough that, given they want to get to market as quickly as possible, they will give up some control. Control is less compelling than wanting to get the job done," said Michael Allen, senior analyst for OSSs at The Aberdeen Group.

Speed to market is the main sales pitch to CLECs for these integrated solutions. It also applies to the vendors. First out of the box was ADC with the May introduction of Singularit.e, an OSS framework comprising six core components (see figure). The solution is anchored by the acquired technologies from Saville Systems and Metrica.

"One of the things we struggled with was how this would be perceived in relation to the old telco-in-a-box strategy," said Rich Aroian, vice president of marketing for ADC. "But we decided - based on our core competencies, our understanding of the business and owning the intellectual capital for some very important pieces of the overall OSS framework - that we could compete extremely well for individual solution opportunities and at the same time offer a broader suite of solutions."

ADC has since announced an alliance with Telcordia Technologies that will provide combined consulting services and offer OSS solutions.

Lucent responded to ADC's news a week later with its Kenan OSS and business support system (BSS) solution. Lucent's solution is a suite of applications developed in-house except for the network inventory software, which Granite Systems supplied.

The foundation of Lucent's OSS/BSS solution is the Arbor/OM order entry and workflow management module. Arbor/BP manages converged billing. Lucent's Billdats data manager is a homegrown, yet multivendor system that collects data from various network elements and reformats it for the billing system. The billing system comes via Lucent's Kenan acquisition.

Being a week behind in announcing a new platform is as good as being first if a company has the right solution, which Lucent thinks it does.

"Before these companies started acquiring different assets, they were partnering to bring solutions together," said Alison Poett, industry marketing manager for Lucent's software products group. "We don't believe any other providers are bringing together as many components in an integrated way as we are."

Some analysts agree. "Lucent has a more complete portfolio than either ADC or Nortel. They have been at it longer. However, they tend to be much more of a wholly owned solution," said Rob Rich, senior analyst with The Yankee Group.

The solution from Harris is primarily homegrown, too. But Harris doesn't have quite the stigma that Lucent and Nortel face as core switch providers offering an integrated OSS.

Harris will introduce its NetBoss integrated communications management platform (ICMP) for wireless and wireline service providers and ISPs this week at Supercomm. Harris delivers its solution on a single hardware/software platform regardless of the technology it supports.

Among the solutions Harris provides in the ICMP is an interconnection gateway module, which most other vendors leave to a third party. The module, called Communicate.IT, has been certified to work with BellSouth's telecommunications access gateway, or TAG interconnection gateway. Harris' Collect.IT module will have an interface to ADC's Saville billing system.

"Today, the market is fragmented and provides point solutions without necessarily standards," said Jim Odom, vice president of the network management business unit for Harris. "If we deliver on a single platform, we can be competitive."

NetBoss also supports billing mediation, network management, performance management, service activation and loop qualification testing.

Nortel has made some obvious moves toward developing an integrated OSS solution, although it hasn't formally announced an integrated product yet. Acquisitions such as Clarify and Architel arm Nortel with strong stand-alone solutions that have broad customer bases of their own.

"The day of the point player is coming quickly to a close because new business models demand you have a pre-integrated solution pack," said Peter Birkwood, director of Preside business development for Nortel.

Though Nortel is working to integrate its OSS holdings, it may be logistically challenging because some solutions reside in different organizations. The Clarify group falls in Nortel's enterprise line of business; Preside is run out of the service provider organization.

The Preside portfolio of management solutions is built on Nortel's integrated network management platform. The company's $395 million acquisition of Architel, pending completion, will build on the Preside platform by automating the provisioning of IP services.

"Nortel's Preside looks like it has many advantages, but they haven't put all the pieces in a tightly knit fabric yet," The Aberdeen Group's Allen said.

One of the missing links in Nortel's OSS platform is a billing solution. The company is in no hurry to acquire one, Birkwood said. "There are 150 billing systems out there. With all the changes in the marketplace, if you were to pick a billing vendor, you would probably pick the wrong one," he said. Nortel also is still looking for a workflow solution and an ordering and transaction application.

As a huge equipment supplier, Nortel, like Lucent, faces the perception that it is locking customers into a single vendor. However, Birkwood doesn't consider it a problem. "Service providers don't mind it," he said. "The industry is crossing the chasm mode to packet networks so [service providers] want to concentrate resources as much as they can to get over the hump."

The chasm has kept the circuit-switched world separate from the emerging packet-switched world. One of the companies trying to bridge the gap is Cisco, which announced agreements last month in conjunction with Tibco Software to work with Ernst & Young and KPMG to provide end-to-end OSS solutions to the broadband and cable markets (Telephony, May 29, page 12).

"Our strategies are quite a bit different [from Lucent and Nortel]," said Todd Murray, group vice president of the communications software group at Cisco. "They are working on building a vertical integration suite of systems encompassing the entire OSS stack all the way through business support systems. We believe that locks customers into a single choice and a single set of options."

Instead, Cisco will continue to accelerate development on the equipment side of the equation and work with software and integration partners to build intelligence into its hardware and related software.

The quality of the technology from these seasoned players is in little doubt. Success eventually could depend on vendor support and price. "The complexity of working across a number of different kinds of mediation and language platforms requires a certain engineering skill set," Allen said. Large providers have the advantage of market size and the engineers to support these solutions.

But technical support and solutions cost money. Lucent offers a pay-as-you-grow plan, and ADC offers a financing program and a hosted solution option. Some other vendors' systems also can be hosted.

Several smaller vendors are offering the hosted, or application service provider (ASP), model, which is proving enticing to small start-ups. "ASPs are putting some overall cost of ownership pressure on vendors," said Larry Goldman, senior analyst at RHK. "They are in the hype and promise mode now, but it may paralyze the decisions some people are making when they think about spending millions of dollars on a system that two years from now they may not need."