IN RECOVERY

OSS vendors traveled thousands of miles to attend the Tell-Me-No-Strategies show (TeleStrategies OSS 2002) in San Diego last week only to be told by speakers in the kick-off session to go home and re-write their software and that they and their service provider customers might want to consider bankruptcy as an exit strategy to get out from under their debt. Even the empty seats groaned.

As the show coordinator announced attendance near 1100--of which 33% were reportedly from the service provider community, yeah right--at least one audience member kept it from reaching 1101 by calling back to his office to stop a co-worker from hopping on a plane to come out for the show.

It makes one wonder about the efficacy of trade shows over the next two years and whether or not the industry might be better served by participants staying home to solve their problems and reconvening on more of an Olympic timetable.

During a “Super Session” featuring members of the carrier, vendor and analyst communities, the audience was treated to a refreshing, but rather unpleasant dose of honesty. It set the tone for the 2.5-day event and perhaps the rest of the year and beyond for OSS. The traditional keynote format for the opening session was abandoned in favor of an open Q&A, so in a way, one could say the audience got what it asked for.

Yankee Group executive vice president Rob Rich did predict their would be some movement in the industry as service providers spend modest amounts on products at the service management layer, such as service quality solutions related to revenue assurance. He also said much of that activity could be outside the U.S.

But for the most part, attendees could have fallen asleep and in waking not be sure what year they were in. For the complaints are the same year-to-year--no standards, no interfaces and no interoperability. The only new complaint was the evaporation of capital.

Overall, the focus on technical shortcomings underscored Rich’s summation of the industry’s long-standing and primary problem: “We are still focusing on the network. If we can’t focus on the products we deliver to customers, how can we ever be successful in the eyes of the customer?”

Lief Hoglund, OSS track director at RHK said that there are 100 disasters in progress within the industry and that part of the reason is that “there are 200 software vendors chasing 20 service providers.”

And many of those are too far in debt to be spending money on OSS applications that “are so hard and complex they may never work,” Hoglund said.

Hoglund is not optimistic on the future of the RBOCs saying that by next year there may be half as many with more trouble ahead. “A lot of large companies have atrophied and it is another indicator that large carriers who seem to be doing good now in five years will be in trouble.”

One of those large carriers could be Qwest. But while it’s still kicking, its principal architect of information technologies, Steve Laufmann, congratulated his vendor audience for “not even knowing what problems they are trying to solve” and suggested every vendor rewrite its software.

Even then it could be a long time before Qwest sidles with any of them. “Who do you bet on--the small vendor with less to re-write but with less resources or the big guys? We aren’t betting on either. We will wait and see because we want one of those winners to be Qwest.”

If the rest of the RBOCs think the same way, no wonder there are 100 disasters in waiting. Laufmann said that vendors won’t be around not because of money issues, but because of technology issues. “They just don’t have anything that interests us.”

Maybe that’s why we are beginning to see service providers of all tiers do what most experts thought they would never have to do again--build their own OSS solutions.

On the other hand, it must be hard for vendors to sell software to customers whose business is as schizophrenic as the RBOCs’. Laufmann admits, “We have our own identity crisis. We’re in so many businesses we’re not sure what business we’re in.”

How do you sell to that?

And Qwest could be the worst kind of schizophrenic--paranoid. Burned by other technology fads, Laufmann believes trendy OSS solutions over the last couple years have exacerbated their problems rather than help solve them. “The minute OSS solutions are deployed, they become our OSS problem,” he said.

Everyone talks about, prognosticates on and prays for an economic recovery that will save us all, but that is just one more way of avoiding the real problem. The first step to a meaningful recovery is admitting one has a problem.

Hi, my name is OSS….