While the virtualization of the RAN is still a sufficiently new and undeveloped market to provide hopeful hunting grounds for alternative vendors, the virtualization of the OSS/BSS is more mature and increasingly dominated by familiar faces. Some of these, like Oracle, have come across from the IT and cloud worlds and so are relatively new to telecoms, but they hardly count as plucky start-ups. The same may soon become true of the virtualized core, where Microsoft has acquired two of the most prominent challengers, Affirmed and Metaswitch, leaving Mavenir as the main specialist provider. While large suppliers seek to stay relevant through cloudification, so do industry associations – notably, in this context, TMForum. Its Open Digital Architecture (ODA) initiative is…