Opening argument

When the TeleManagement Forum introduced its Opensource Program in May, TMF President Jim Warner called the initiative “open source in quotes.” The term may have caused some confusion among the OSS faithful who wondered how open the program would be. It is becoming clear that in its early stages, the TMF initiative won't resemble typical open-source software programs that have become increasingly popular in telecom and other industries. However, that doesn't mean it won't have value to network operators along the way to whatever it ultimately becomes.

For now, the Opensource Program could be considered a feeder program for the TMF's New Generation Operations System and Software (NGOSS) framework. Companies such as Agilent, BT, Covad Communications, COLT Telecom, Cable & Wireless, NTT, Vodafone and others have pooled some resources to identify persistent industrywide issues that they can address by solving problems and opening their results to the broader community, which can use them to build their NGOSS implementations.

This definition falls short of the typical definition of open source for a reason: The market for open-source OSS components doesn't exist yet. Typically, open source signifies that source code for an application or operating system is openly available to a community of developers so that they can enhance it by building new features or making it more robust. Companies such as Linux innovator Red Hat and Open Systems Development Labs (OSDL) have created business models around this practice. But the TMF and its community of software vendors are not ready for that kind of living arrangement.

“Open source has already infiltrated the operating system environment, but an open-source model in the OSS market really doesn't reflect reality. There's no good business model for anyone to make money,” said Patrick Kelly, partner and co-founder of analyst firm OSS Observer.

So the ultimate goals for the TMF's open-source initiative pertaining to the forum becoming the next Red Hat or the OSDL of OSS may be looking too far ahead. But in terms of its ability to solve immediate issues for network operators, the open-source initiative can do nothing but help.

There are two things to remember about this initiative. First, the term “open” in this case refers more to the sharing of lessons learned through implementation and some technology than to the sharing of source code, at least initially. Secondly, while open source software is finding some traction in the voice-over-IP community with SIP stacks and IP-PBXs, the TMF Opensource Program applies to OSS, and OSS is a back-office concept universal to all operators, including wireless.

Worldwide OSS Sales Revenue by OSS Type, 2005-2010

Compound annual growth rate
Billing	4.1%
Customer care	4.0%
Planning/engineering	4.6%
Provisioning/inventory	4.4%
Trouble repair	6.1%
Network management	4.0%
Business management	2.0%
Workforce management	1.5%
Total	3.9%
Source: Insight Research Corp.

Since announcing the program in May, the group of volunteering companies within the forum has identified several areas of concern. Rising to the top is the development of OSS/J adapters. OSS/J is the OSS-through-Java initiative begun by Sun Microsystems. It is an extension of the J2EE initiative within Sun and part of its Java Community Process.

Participating companies within OSS/J cooperatively have begun to produce OSS/J adapters for specific systems. Some companies, such as Covad, have in turn released those adapters back to the service provider and OSS vendor communities so that everyone can benefit from their work and move the industry toward more standard interfaces, thus, the similarities to open source. It's close, but no Cohiba.

These adapters are open but are not formally open source in the way that people are free to modify the code.

“It may be a subtlety, but it's these subtleties that an awful lot of the [software] world is obsessed with at the moment,” said Martin Creaner, chief technology officer of the TeleManagement Forum. “There can be billions of dollars of implications to those subtleties across the industry.”

When Covad developed OSS/J adapters for trouble ticketing and billing applications programming interfaces earlier this year, they didn't worry about open source implications. Paul Grantham, vice president of software and information systems for Covad, said at the time, “We are all paying a high price for not agreeing on something that is pretty simple and is not a distinguishing competitive feature.”

Creaner said that fixed operators are a little more awake to the concept of open source than wireless operators. However, when it comes to OSS, the issues for operators are the same.

“I can't see why there should be any measurable difference in attitude toward open source for wireless operators,” he said. “Open source is not going to be hugely applicable for the application space but for the interface space between applications — that's just a level of detail where I don't see a huge difference.”

Some wireless operators, Vodafone and AT&T Wireless in particular, have been getting more involved with OSS/J adapters. Vodafone has been involved with OSS/J for a long time and has moved closer to adopting its interfaces and adapters and is a member of the Opensource Program. AT&T Wireless, now Cingular, has been involved more deeply in OSS/J and is one of the participants on a panel discussing OSS/J at next month's TeleManagement World forum in Dallas.

But being involved doesn't always lead to implementations. An OSS/J spokesman said that when one considers the pace of overall industry adoption and change, OSS/J is moving at lightening speed. Perhaps implementations of OSS/J adapters and interfaces will move more swiftly now that the battle of the middleware standards has been won.

Dan Baker, director of OSS research at Dittberner Associates, said in a recent report that the battle over which standards will dominate is essentially over. J2EE is the clear winner, and that market is uniting behind it and its telco extension: OSS/J.

Baker said that the most exciting change in OSS/BSS middleware is the rise of a new class of tools he calls OSS/J middleware. Middleware vendors such as BEA, with its Weblogic, and IBM, with its Websphere, which both support J2EE, are the clear winners in the middleware market.

Baker expects that market to grow to $870 million in 2008. In 2004, it was a $728 million arena. J2EE application servers will capture 78% of that 2008 market value. He also said that other approaches, such as the “standards-friendly” Enterprise Software Bus, will steadily displace proprietary Enterprise Application Integration solutions.

Worldwide OSS Sales Revenue Wireline vs. Wireless 2005-2010

Compound annual growth rate
Wireline	3.0%
Wireless	5.0%
Total	3.9%

However, despite all this long-awaited agreement, OSS may still be part of the problem, and not the solution, as operators attempt to bundle triple-play services. Unresolved problems in service activation, trouble management and service assurance could even delay triple-play deployments, according to another Dittberner report from last month.

Baker said triple-play OSSs are still stuck in the labs, while operators are ready to roll out triple-play services to the network. Vendors appear to be stalled on quality of service (QOS) and management issues, the aforementioned service activation and whether to build versus buy their capabilities. Like political parties in the U.S., operators are split down the middle on this topic. Verizon, for example, leans toward self-development while SBC Communications has committed to buying off-the-shelf software when available.

Issues such as interconnection and inventory in a video or IP environment, respectively, also need to be resolved in order for OSS to become part of the solution.

The APIs for service activation and QOS were in their final release stage, considered Release 1.0, within the OSS/J community in March awaiting review. Other APIs being developed include inventory, service quality management, pricing, discovery and order management.

Once the catalog of OSS/J adapters is ready, the TMF wants to develop a set of implementations around them and make them available to open source, the qualified kind.

“We have had a huge response to the source part of open source and felt huge trepidation and nervousness to the open part,” Creaner said. “The challenge around open is how it will be applied.”

Creaner said the level of openness depends on service providers and how far they are willing to go. He reiterated that the TMF's plans do not extend to applications, only to APIs. “No one sees a market for open-source billing systems or network management solutions,” he said.

But the long-term expectation at TMF if the first set of variables, most of which have yet to be determined, succeed, is to become more traditional in its approach to open source. Warner said at the launch of this program that the ultimate goal was to take ownership of the technology that results from these implementations and to manage the resulting specifications.

He admitted that it would take “a whole lot of work to get it done.” Six months later, some of that work is done. The group has its first mission, which is to focus on the OSS/J adapters. The next set of missions may be revealed next month at the next TeleMangement World, where wireless operators will have their say.