In a bid to provide comprehensive operation support systems, big vendors and carriers may be biting off more than they can chew, according to a new study.
Many smaller players are using bigger vendors like L.M. Ericsson, Lucent Technologies Inc. and Alcatel Alsthom as channels, thus bringing the smaller players under the spell of the marquee vendors.
“Not only do the big hardware or OSS vendors risk over-reaching with their integration services, so do the service providers risk potential architectural dead ends by turning over their OSS procurement and integration decisions to outsiders,” said the study’s author, Peter Lambert, an analyst with Heavy Reading.
This trend is driven by carriers’ shift from cutting costs to managing costs and launching new revenue streams, he said.
Since smaller players rely on partnerships with big vendors, players like Ericsson, Lucent and Alcatel may fall into the danger that led a Hewlett Packard-Ericsson alliance to collapse two years ago, remarked Lambert.
Both companies formed the EHPT, a tie-up designed to play a major role in the emerging market. HP, however, did not lose entirely. Neither did Ericsson. In addition to learning a lesson early, Ericsson took with it a platform of hardware and software, while HP lapped up a set of engineers to further its OSS dreams.
“A number of suppliers point out that a number of CLECs made mistakes in OSS as they hurried to market in the mid-1990s, and that speed-to-market corner cutting came back to bite them,” Lambert said.
The OSS areas the report covered included service provisioning and activation, network performance monitoring, customer relationship management and billing and revenue assurance.
Lambert identified the service layer, where service provisioning and inventory management occurs in the network, as the hottest market for wireless OSS channel partnership.
He noted, however, that carriers tend to want to deal with big players because they are familiar and tested. So big vendors, lacking some expertise and software capabilities, team up with niche players.
Meanwhile, wireless operators are demanding products that cut across traditional OSS boundaries, especially in the areas of billing, revenue assurance and service management. “This demand shift has significant implications for OSS vendors that are trying to break into the wireless sector,” said the report.
The big players cannot go it alone, he said. Alcatel has partnerships that cover such domains as billing, customer relationship management, middleware, inventory management and fault management. Ericsson’s partnerships span elemental management, middleware, inventory management, fault management, performance monitoring and service management.
There are, however, some smaller players with comprehensive solutions, said Lambert. They include companies like Metasolv Inc. and Telcordia Inc. Yet, because of its relatively smaller size, they cooperate with the Ericssons and Alcatels.
“They need to appear on the radar screen,” said Lambert. Metasolv went on an acquisition spree in the past couple of years. Telcordia recently acquired Granite Systems, which does inventory management.
