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Playing Well With Others Reprinted with permission from Xchange Magazine, August, 2002, By Peter Lambert
Many say the buyers are grading individual point products in great part on their capacity and readiness to play well with others in an integrated, full-service package. With that mandate in mind, vendors lit up the SUPERCOMM show floor with integrated operations support system and business support system demonstrations. The common thread through every marketing pitch associated with these demonstrations: automated flow-through of data and tasks from one OSS/BSS to another hands service providers the necessary keys to reducing costly human intervention and accelerating the delivery of new, revenue-generating services to market. Still unanswered, however, is which integration methods will rule. One school suggests that 'best combinations' of preintegrated products from each OSS/BSS category will achieve interworking while relieving buyers of integration labors and costs. At SUPERCOMM, such end-to-end solutions came from single vendors and partnerships. The other school suggests that highly open standards for inter-OSS information and process sharing is necessary to enable carriers to respond easily to unforeseen market conditions by fitting any vendor it chooses into a plug-and-play, best-of-breed framework. Few software vendors fit neatly or exclusively into one camp or the other. Indeed, as they face a coming shakeout that analysts believe will mirror the speed and mercilessness of ongoing buyer consolidation, many vendors who used SUPERCOMM to showcase preintegrated offerings also boasted an open standards positioning. Camps On the plug-and-play, best-of-breed side of the equation, a dozen vendors and system integrators joined forces at the show to tout the promise of the OSS Through Java Initiative (OSS/J). Founded in September 2000, OSS/J is building on the success of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology in enterprise applications and e-commerce, as well as cross-industry Common Object Brokering Architecture (CORBA) and extensible markup language (XML) standards. Those technologies provide a framework for developing reusable applications in the form of software 'objects' and for exchanging tasks and data among OSSs. OSS/J's first phase targeted the development of application programming interfaces for Trouble Ticket, 3G wireless service activation and quality of service systems, followed by an Inventory API late last year. A billing API is on the way. All APIs are standardized under the latest Java Community Process (JCP) program, yielding cross-industry economies of scale, according to advocates. The plan, says Eftia OSS Solutions Inc. CTO Christopher Dean, is to systematically "knock off" an API for each OSS category, issue public domain development and testing kits to the vendor community, "then aggressively try to get them into practical use." So far, OSS/J has certified only one commercially available product, the premioss-sp service provisioning module from IP VALUE GmbH. But high-profile vendors, including Telcordia Technologies Inc., say they have implemented the APIs for demonstration purposes and intend to map their future developments around Java, CORBA and XML technologies.
Among OSS/J advocates at SUPERCOMM were:
Unlike past approaches to an 'integration bus' by such middleware players as SeeBeyond Technology Corp., TIBCO Software Inc. and Vitria Technology Inc. "with OSS/J, we're all mapping to a common information model per API that is all in the public domain, so nobody will own this," says Eftia's Dean. He notes that Java and XML pave the way for app-to-app integration and browser-based access to any OSS. "I'd hope we'd start to see general adoption next year, because why reinvent the wheel? We think this has the best shot at getting what everyone wants: applications dynamically talking to one another." To read more, please visit: http://www.x-changemag.com/articles/281back2.html |