SDN NFV 640x360 24Sep2015

Next-Gen Networks – Last-Gen OSS

What happens to your OSS when you want to offer SaaS-like services on an enterprise carrier network like Colt’s? Not much, apparently…

There’s a great interview published by Light Reading with Mirko Voltolini and Fahim Sabir from Colt about their move to offer cloud-like services on their network, leveraging SDN and NFV.

What stands out for me is the list of OSS/BSS they’re still happily using, many year in to the move to software defined, virtualized networking:

“For its On Demand offering, Colt continues to leverage its existing OSS/BSS systems such as Granite (inventory), Kenan/Amdocs (billing), Siebel/Oracle (order management and customer care), EMC Smarts (monitoring) and InfoVista (analytics).”

Most of the work apparently was using APIs to build their own business processes and orchestration on top of the SDN/NFV platforms.

“Legacy OSS/BSS doesn’t need to change much.” and “We haven’t had to spend a significant amount of time or money on integration…” are not phrases you often hear in this industry.

Worth a read, at Light Reading.

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