May 23, 2005 12:00 AM,

TMF EYES OSS HELP FROM OPEN SOURCE

By Tim McElligott

Convergence and business transformation may have been the planned themes of last week's TeleManagement World conference held in Nice, France, but it was a radical, and ultimately not-so-new, idea in operations support systems formally introduced by the TeleManagement Forum that quickly stole the thunder: open source OSS.

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The introduction of the contribution-based Opensource Program was met with mixed reviews, everything from shoulder shrugs and quizzical glances to emphatic statements that it was about time. The intensity of some responses almost had the forum backing off the concept of open source altogether.

“It's ‘open source’ in quotes,” said Jim Warner, president of the TMF. “People have so many of their own definitions of open source, and the purists started screaming.”

Nonetheless, the TMF is moving forward with what Warner calls a radical new way of doing business. Like many initiatives of the forum, The Opensource Program is designed to further the adoption of its New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) framework, which has the potential to make network operators more automated, lean and profitable.

Proponents of the Opensource Program expect it to help service providers reduce the time and costs associated with solving the issues around interoperability they and their software vendors have been trying to solve, semi-successfully, for decades.

There are several steps to be taken before any code or specifications are opened to the broader community in an open source fashion. The plan is for participants in the program to first identify the most significant industrywide issues they need to solve. (Warner said they can't be carrier-specific issues.) Then program leaders will issue requests for technology to solve them. Next, they will pick and/or combine technology from multiple submissions and put the specification out to the public domain.

The results of the Opensource Program will be fed into the TMF's NGOSS framework, which provides a toolkit for business process mapping and software development. The best solutions and their underlying design will be made openly available to the entire industry at no cost.

The TMF's intent is to ultimately take ownership of the technology that results, by taking on the role of managing the resulting specifications. Warner called open source the ultimate answer to these issues and the single most important, pervasive development with which the TMF has been involved. He said eventually he could see the forum acting as the OSDL of OSS. The Open Systems Development Labs is a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux.

“It would take a whole lot of work to get there, though. Our mission is really just to get things to market so everyone can use them,” Warner said.

The forum has launched several initiatives toward this end. The OSS through Java (OSS-J) Initiative builds adapters and Java-based application interfaces for specific operations functions such as trouble ticketing and fault management. There is also a project called the Cooperative Open OSS Project being developed by the nine largest mobile equipment vendors to create standard management interfaces for their equipment. Another group is working on a new interface standard called the multi-technology operations systems interface, which they demonstrated last week at TMW.

However, the Opensource Program is different in that it is not a group that is forming within the TMF to go off for a year and work on a single problem. Instead, the program borrows a page from the IT world, which has readily embraced open source software such as Linux and allows all members to contribute to new technology developments.

“It's a classic problem that telcos have been incredibly customized compared to the IT industry. So maybe it's time to think of this being a leap-frog type effort,” said Elisabeth Rainge, program director of next-gen OSS, billing and network management for IDC. “There seems to be a broader based effort by vendors themselves to cope with this problem.”

Through the Opensource Program, the TMF will invite contributions from vendors that are then driven against industry established priorities and eventually made available to service providers through an open source-like model.

The key here is the term “like.” For skeptics who balk at the notion that service providers would put open source software into their highly reliable networks, Warner said: “In a pure open source environment, anyone can contribute to the specification. That's not what we have planned.”

The rules for the program are that any development must be done according to the guidelines of NGOSS. Another distinction is that the program won't necessarily be dealing with software code as much as with specifications and application interfaces.

“Although not all service providers are as on-board with open source as are enterprises,” said Scott Donahue, vice president and senior analyst of IT automation and management for Tier 1 Research, “They will get around to it, mostly in middleware or some components of open source. But I don't think they will have their whole operation on open source software.”

If the type of companies that sponsored and worked on the OpenOSS Catalyst project at this year's forum is any indication, there is significant service provider interest in open source (see listing). The project, one of many proof-of-concept demonstrations at TMW, demonstrated the first use of open source software to drive implementation of OSS standards.

“It was a real validation of the open source approach,” said Karl Whitelock, lead strategist for OSS at Agilent Technologies. “We were the only real OSS vendors in the project. That shows you that service providers want this.”

The project demonstrated a case study that used enterprise software such as application servers, portal servers and databases as well as OSS-J quality of service and trouble ticket application interfaces (APIs) to integrate open source OSS software and commercial off-the-shelf products and deliver fully documented open source OSS components that are freely available for download.

Covad has already demonstrated its support of open source OSS by freely giving back to the community the APIs it helped developed through the OSS-J initiative. Covad is a proponent of everyone else doing the same.

Although they didn't discuss open source directly in their speeches about convergence and transformation, keynoters at TMW last week stressed the need for better collaboration.

“We could use an increased level of bilateral cooperation,” said David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing and product management for MetaSolv, referring to the need to bring lessons learned from the field back into the community to be collaboratively addressed and shared. That sounds exactly like what the TMF is proposing.

And there is no doubt that IT influences are helping to drive the changes in BT's 21st Century Network project when Chief Technology Officer Matthew Bross refers to the shift from being a provider of telephony services to providing “networked IT” and says that Information Communications Technology is just IT with communications in the middle.

IT seems to be winning the turf war against telephony purists as to whose technologies and methodologies will control the next-generation network. One of biggest changes to result could be the use of open source in the back office — or not. Either way, the IT department is beginning to drive a lot of change in telecom. And according to Bross, “The change in front of us will dwarf anything in our past.”