Another Crack at Taming the OSS Beast

Earlier this month, a group of executives gathered in Nice, the center of the French Riviera. Instead of enjoying inviting beaches or partaking in other local customs, these execs discussed operations support systems from dawn until dusk. And for the pleasure of participating in the Telemanagement Forum's new Catalyst Projects, which demonstrate OSS interoperability, some companies even ponied up more than $100,000.

The goal of TMF's Catalyst Projects is to demonstrate real-world applications of the forum's year-old set of principles, called New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS). With NGOSS, the forum's goals are to create off-the-shelf products and documentation that can contribute to the development of meaningful OSS standards. But this has left many to wonder: Can an industry group that has changed directions four times over the past seven years focus enough to make OSS interoperability happen?

"Interoperability is never going to be as easy as plugging something into the wall and getting electricity," says Mark Mortensen, chief marketing officer at Granite Systems. But he contends that a certain level of interoperability is possible. "It's well understood in software terms that if you spend $1 and have to interface with something after you've built the product, it's going to cost you 50 cents, but if you think of it ahead of time, it's going to cost you a nickle."

Mortensen expects NGOSS and the Catalyst Projects to solve about a quarter of the interoperability problems a vendor and service provider might ultimately face.

How It All Started

How did OSS integration become such a problem? Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Telcordia (then known as Bellcore) was the main OSS vendor in town and oversaw standards. The birth of the CLEC industry triggered a new OSS industry, and today there are about 400 OSS suppliers.

Over the past five years, service provider networks have become much more complex, with new hardware such as DSL access multiplexers and optical networking gear that need to be managed. The goal of NGOSS and the Catalyst Projects is to establish interoperability among OSSs and hardware.

Proponents and critics both say that by simply bringing vendors and service providers together to work on interoperability issues, TMF has helped move the industry closer to the elusive interoperability goal. "After the Nice meeting last year, the forum was having a difficult time defining what it was because it couldn't focus long enough," says Jerry McDowell, VP of product management at Dorado Software. But McDowell says he's changed his mind over the past year, as he's worked with the forum and had an opportunity to see how it's moving forward.

While most TMF watchers acknowledge that the intent of the forum is noble, some wonder how far the Catalyst work will really go. Indeed, 36 hours before the show in Nice earlier this month, Cap Gemini decided to pull out of its demonstration, saying it wasn't getting enough benefit from the money it had invested, according to one insider.

Even internally, some forum members wonder if all the vendors will be able to agree on proposed standards or guidelines and actually implement them. "We could have a bunch of ivory-tower agreements, but unless it's truly implemented into software, then there's no value-add," says Natalie St. Denis, director of corporate marketing at Astracon.

Oh, well, there's always next spring.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in The Net Economy.