And now a word to the sponsors

Catalyst Showcase becoming a real draw at TMF If Todd Murray, Cisco Systems' vice president of the communications software group, is correct that within six months many of the operations support system solutions demonstrated at last month's TeleManagement World Catalyst Showcase in Chicago will be deployed commercially, then life in the domestic service provider back office could begin to get a little easier.

But that depends on whether the multivendor solutions being developed by Catalyst participants are what service providers are looking for and, if they are, whether service providers can afford them.

It's a given that independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) have the service providers' collective ear and are not developing solutions in a vacuum. Clearly, the ISVs know the issues and are attempting to solve them.

But do service providers have the ears of the ISVs and SIs? Are they even asking for them? Domestic service provider participation in the TeleManagement Forum continues to lag behind international carriers, especially in the Catalyst projects where BT, Telia, Telstra, NTT Group and France Telecom are particularly visible. Verizon Communications participated in both the IP Virtual Private Network Management project and the World Ordering Exchange DSL project as the lone U.S. service provider participant and sponsor.

Participating in the TMF and its pet projects is certainly not a requirement for service providers. However, as less and less development is done in-house, one would think that carriers would want a louder voice in the OSSs being developed and given priority.

There is a downside to not being involved, said Elizabeth Adams, who will retire as president and CEO of the TMF this month. "As with everything like this, when the customer doesn't take a direct interest, then they get what they get. And if they don't like it, they're sunk."

There is a plethora of other opportunities for service providers to engage in pre-deployment projects with vendors. However, besides not wanting to be perceived as supporting a particular vendor, as Adams also suggested, there is little short-term financial incentive for service providers to pour desperately needed resources into such projects, even if they wanted to. And current market conditions don't help.

"How do you get folks engaged for more than a nanosecond at a time when they are all struggling so hard with so many difficult issues facing their businesses?" Adams asked. "They are all going through tremendous turmoil right now - biggest to smallest. In that environment, it is very difficult getting people engaged in thinking about how to advance something."

However, some service providers feel that the only way to reach the common, open platforms necessary for growth is to participate. "If you are out there and you are a service provider, come and help us. Help the TMF know what you need," said Tom Forsyth, head of network service management for Orange PCS.

Forsyth participated in a service provider roundtable at last month's conference along with Hideo Yamamoto, vice president of the global business division for NTT Communications; David Carlton, senior manager at UUNet; and Mikael Ahman, manager of information systems for Skanova, a company within Telia Group. The common theme was the need for cooperative development of solutions for common problems.

Ahman thinks there is a long way to go. "I have seen a lot of promising solutions here today, but plug and play? No way," Ahman said. "Our war is still going on, and it should have been over already. None of the solutions shown here will help us in a single stroke to do what we really need to do."

Even the vendors agree. "Point solutions have been developed to serve the specific needs of providing DSL vs. provisioning cable," said Cisco's Murray, whose company was involved in six of the nine Catalyst projects. "Ultimately, if you are a customer with all these different networks, you want one provisioning engine, one architecture, for provisioning all services. I am not aware of one solution on the market today that does it all, but ideally that's the place we would like to get to."

Some vendors say they are closer than others are, and one says they should all get a failing grade. "We have to score ourselves in the broken promises category," said Stephen Nicolle, president of the Serviceware Solutions group at Nortel Networks, referring to the industry as a whole. Nicolle proceeded to offer his vision of a new customer economy, where "e-business is thee business."

Nicolle's comments underscored the reality of the OSS market, which is that while service providers call for a common platform and the TMF comes up with a framework, called NGOSS, for developing one, this is still a competitive market with a great deal of money at stake and not a community of altruists.

Vendors always will attempt to advance their own visions of the future. Although Cisco, along with many of its Ecosystem partners, proved that their systems can work together to solve problems, Nicolle said, "The value of point solutions only gets realized when integrated. The Ecosystem model has proven itself not to work. All failed service providers have gone the way of the Ecosystem."

Smaller vendors, whose best interests lay in working successfully and visibly with others, stick to more immediate concerns. "We were the only Catalyst group to demonstrate plug and play using all off-the-shelf software, which is deployed in the field today," said Frank Lauria, vice president of strategic business development for CommTech.