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 designed to provide a platform to support standardized, open components for a virtualized OSS/BSS, and it has attracted a group of new supporters.
On the vendor side, they are all heavyweights – Nokia, Amdocs, Oracle and Netcracker, while four European telcos have also signed up – BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Telenor.
The ODA was unveiled in early 2018, building on existing TMForum initiatives such as its set of open APIs (application programming interfaces) and its digital framework. Like many similar initiatives in the open telecoms space, the ODA aims to provide a blueprint to reduce the risk and complexity of adopting a new architecture, by defining key specifications and aligning them to best practice. Its reference architecture maps TMF’s open APIs against technical and business platform functions.
When it was announced, ODA promised an “industry-agreed blueprint, language and set of key design principles”, prvoiding “pragmatic pathways for the journey from maintaining monolithic, legacy software solutions, towards managing nimble, cloud-based capabilities that can be orchestrated using AI”
It has enjoyed support and inputs from various operators, such as Orange, but has been fairly low profile, so the new endorsements should help put it more firmly on telcos’ radars. Nik Willetts, CEO of TMF, said: “The momentum building to collaboratively deliver the Open Digital Architecture is the software market foundation our industry deserves, instead of sinking resources into maintenance and integration of customized legacy solutions that are blocking agility and innovation.”
Thierry Souche, group CIO at Orange Lab Services, added: “The Open Digital Architecture offers a modern approach and the standards required for the industry to thrive, avoiding rigid, complex customized solutions. This is not about commoditization of IT software. It’s about freeing us to focus on delivering new and differentiated services.”
Souche told LightReading that he is currently managing two multimillion dollar IT projects in Africa that will take years because of the “monolithic” systems in use. And old-style BSS systems are a significant barrier to the commercial agility to which telcos aspire. Orange is looking to diversify its revenue streams and has made significant investments in areas like banking and energy, but that requires a rethink of the BSS. With traditional technology, specifying and deploying a new BSS, or other large IT system, at the scale required by an Orange operating company, would take about 2.5 years and cost between $7m and $12m, Souche said.
Using ODA-compliant open components, he would aim to configure the BSS, Lego-style, and would expect to have an IT stack in place in about one year, and with lower costs in the region of $3m to $7m. Those sums could represent absolute cost savings, or could be spent on additional projects to deliver far greater value from the deployment. “I would ask for analytics and value creation and look at exploring more service stacks,” Souche said in the interview.
It may be that the traditional vendors in this space are attracted by comments about analytics and the like – additional spending in more interesting areas of technology than BSS. Despite the obvious threats of an open, componentized architecture to their traditional business strategies and margins, they could make the transition to something closer to the enterprise open source model, building value added services on top of free, open foundations.
Or they may see sticks more clearly than carrots – if they don’t embrace approaches like ODA, others will. These may be start-ups, but the more concerning scenario would be an invasion of the telecoms IT space by the cloud companies. Microsoft’s acquisition of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch puts it in a position to deliver the core to operators or enterprises on an as-a-service basis, and it is highly likely to build an entire 5G stack in Azure, over time.