BSS

With the battle for control of development environments finally over, the worldwide market for OSS and BSS middleware is now poised for steady growth, predicted to rise from $728 million last year to $870 million in 2008, according to a recent report from Dittberner Associates. But the results point to big-picture challenges as wireless and wireline operators struggle to deploy new content and services at a dizzying pace.

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While the comprehensive report doesn't predict the all-too-common hockey stick-like skyward growth, the telecom industry has reached its goal of a single approach to simplifying its OSS/BSS environment. The focus has shifted from IBM MQSeries point-to-point integrations, to publish-and-subscribe EAI (enterprise application integration), to J2EE and Web services.

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Now Dittberner sees the market uniting around a widely accepted standard. "The battle over which standard will dominate is essentially over," says Dan Baker, Dittberner's director of OSS research. "The J2EE environment is the clear winner with BEA's WebLogic and IBM WebSphere being the two most J2EE-popular application servers," he adds.

Overall, the report forecasts that J2EE application servers will capture 78 percent of the OSS/BSS middleware market in 2008 (see chart). The scalable, standards-friendly enterprise software bus approach of vendors such as Cape Clear and Sonic Software will gain ground, steadily displacing the proprietary EAI solutions that were popular in the late '90s.

Rise of OSS/J

However the most exciting OSS/BSS middleware development, according to Dittberner, is the rise of a new class of tools, the so-called "OSS/J middleware," which builds on the OSS/BSS industry's own Java extension, OSS/J.

"Plain vanilla middleware is yesterday's flavor," Baker says. "The toughest task in telecom integration is not connectivity but figuring out how to get a trouble-ticket system to talk with network monitoring. The new OSS/J tools basically let you write from an expert outline instead of from a blank piece of paper."

A business case in point: Vodafone recently inserted OSS/J middleware in its service management integration architecture comprised of a HP TeMIP fault management system, Remedy trouble management, an Agilent NetExpert service monitoring system, and other components.

The operator had previously maintained point-to-point connections between these solutions, making it hard to adjust the architecture to meet fast-changing market requirements. Leveraging software from IP VALUE, Vodafone fitted a generic OSS/J trouble-ticket object into its existing infrastructure and can now simply configure its system extensions on the fly. Since changes are not hardcoded, adjustments are far easier to build and apply.

The Bigger Picture

The pace at which wireless and wireline operators plan to deliver new offerings is going from a jog to a sprint, Baker notes. "When these new services come about, it's going to require more than just a radical shift in thinking to a radical shift in the way products are introduced, reduced and retired. Unless there's integration across all the necessary elements, including OSS, operators won't be able to deliver services in a rapid-fire manner."

While that may seem like a big change from the recent days of wireless operators delivering services manually, Baker points to SK Telecom of South Korea as the poster carrier for quick service delivery, claiming the company introduces and retires some 5,000 new content items and services daily.

"The entire landscape of the telecom services industry is changing, which means that OSSs have to evolve to enable this change for survival of the quickest," Baker says. "The last time I looked, Verizon had some 2,500 products in its catalog. With constant introductions--acquisitions notwithstanding--that will increase and drive huge development in the back office."

Dittberner's OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase[TM] is a market research service designed to track the growing number of emerging OSS/BSS vendors and their potential. For carriers, the KnowledgeBase[TM] provides lessons learned and vendor selection advice to lower decision-making risk. Vendors learn about carrier priorities, competitive threats, and niche market opportunities.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group