Learning to live with pain

OSS industry bucks up under market realities After months under a shower of burst bubbles, the operations support industry showed at last week's TeleManagement World conference in Chicago that it cleans up quite nicely and that, with proper care, it can retain its shine for a long time.

Judging by the tone of service providers, investors, analysts and - naturally - vendors, the pill of reality does not appear to be so bitter after all. A strong dose seems to have sharpened the industry's focus and tempered enthusiasm to a more moderate and appropriate level.

Although service provider participation was still shy of expectations, the show boasted more than 2000 attendees and showed signs of vigor, from the big-budget productions to the off-site events.

"It's getting to be a mini-Supercomm or Geneva. On a much smaller scale, but with the same level of importance," said Elizabeth Adams, outgoing TeleManagement Forum president and CEO.

Notable highlights were increased participation in the forum's Catalyst projects, the inclusion of an investor's forum, a major overhaul of the Telecom Operation's Map and progress on a proposed next generation of operations systems and software, or NGOSS, common information model.

More important was the frank discussion on the floor, in the session and from the keynote stage on the true state of flow-through provisioning, best-of-breed models and the future direction of operations support systems (OSSs).

"Trends... are driving us toward free access in the marketplace," said Todd Murray, vice president at Cisco Systems. "If you are a service provider and your business case is built on either transport or access, it's not enough. You better figure out how to be the best Dell computer in the telecommunications industry with a high-volume and low-margin business, or you better figure out how to drive more value into the business going forward."

Murray put the onus for finding answers to this problem on the OSS industry.

"We, as providers of equipment, network infrastructures and operations support systems, will have to figure out how to get service providers into that space or this industry will continue to struggle," he said.

DSL.net's Chief Technology Officer Paul Sun's keynote address exemplified the temperament of the forum body, which acknowledges recent pain while looking to a reality-based future that still holds promise.

Sun called on vendors to help turn the tide of a declining average revenue per user, which he said is falling 30% to 40% per year. "That is roughly the same price erosion as the personal computing industry, which is extremely cutthroat," Sun said.

Vendors must respond to the pressure by helping to introduce new products and services to make up for the decline in revenues, Sun added.

This lament is not new. What is new is the public support expressed by Sun for the TMF's NGOSS program as a way to identify a generally accepted architecture that would help the industry flourish in the same way networking did when it settled on TCP/IP.

"Let's support the NGOSS," Sun said. "It's a great start, but it needs the help of leaders in the room." Sun also called on vendors to help reduce costs. "The cost of ownership has to come down. It can't be sustained," he said.

Sun estimated the minimum cost of building a complete OSS is $50 million.

"That's not the end of it. We have to maintain it. Then there are upgrades, enhancing products and services; and to make it Web-enabled to involve our customers is another million [dollars]. Under the current capital-market environment, it is extremely difficult," Sun said.

While supporting NGOSS, forum members temper it with a renewed sense of reality.

"The way NGOSS is laid out today, it is a bit beyond realistic," said Curtis Begley, president for HarmonyCom. "But we support it. It's great to put out there and work towards because we need that ideal to shoot at. Getting to 80% [of the goals of NGOSS] may be nirvana, and we may never get better than that."

In an overview of the NGOSS project, Bruce Murrill, interim chief technical officer of the TMF, said he was "struck by the level of interest in NGOSS" and called on vendors to stop infighting and share data across applications.

"If we don't solve these problems, there will be an impact across the industry, not just for service providers but... equipment will slow down and the whole industry will slow down," Murrill said.