All quiet on the Optus OSS front

It was, I am sure, no coincidence that NEC announced a major OSS deal with Optus on the day that Optus announced its Q2 results, as part of parent SingTel's Q2 results announcement.

Optus is trying to play down the importance of a deal that will have far reaching effects on the company for years to come and, if successful, will greatly improve Optus' agility and competitiveness. And if not successful...

NEC subsidiary NetCracker is providing a complete operational support system upgrade to Optus. NetCracker products will support all Optus services - consumer and business - across the entire service fulfilment chain from service order management to network configuration and activation.

The project will take three years to complete and is believed to be one of the biggest of its kind being undertaken by a major telco anywhere in the world.

Optus is saying nothing. Rather than crow about what the deal could mean in terms of efficiency, improved customer service, etc it is keeping its head down. Not that its low profile will make any impact where the news really matters - to Optus major competitors who will be monitoring the project as closely as they can for signs of its impact on Optus' market activities, and for any signs of hiccups.

Gartner has just released its Magic Quadrant for OSS. It has NetCracker as the highest ranked player in the leaders quadrant, marginally ahead of Amdocs and Ericsson. Oracle and IBM are also in the leaders quadrant.

More important though, here is what Gartner has to say about OSS in general: "OSS data is of strategic importance to measure the impact on specific operational, customer and business goals. OSS helps to improve operational efficiency, drive down costs and improve customer experience. ... [OSS data is used] to link operational technical planning with actual customer data, and hence is used by lines of business, marketing, strategic planning, etc.

And like almost every other area of IT, OSS is struggling to keep up with disruption. "The evolution of digital services and of convergent services poses complex challenges for OSS. Challenges include machine to machine (M2M), value-added services (VAS) and B2B (enterprise), as well as the need to provide more competitive personalized services (many of which consist of third party content and components)," Gartner says.

It's believed to be 10 years since Optus undertook a major OSS upgrade, so you can be pretty sure it's existing systems are under stress.

And I have not mentioned one of the biggest disruptions to telcos that is approaching at great speed: the combination of software defined networking and network functions virtualisation.

As Gartner says: "The arrival of NFV and SDN will be disruptive to [telcos'] existing OSS architectures, potentially requiring an upgrade or a new generation of OSSs. Network-facing OSSs — such as provisioning, fault and event, and performance management — must be re-architected to support network and service orchestration functions for hybrid infrastructures."

In short, it would be no exaggeration to say that the future of Optus depends on the success of this project.

In search of the Internet of Everything

The Guardian 's web site this week carried a lengthy article that sought to arrive at a clear definition of the 'Internet of Things'. While it explored the topic it did not do much to clarify the definition.

"You could be forgiven for believing that the Internet of things (IoT) is a well-defined term and that everyone is on the same page," it said. "But you would be mistaken to say the least, given the huge variety of intelligent connected devices that this term refers to."

That doesn't make much sense: the term surely is meant to be all-embracing, to include every kind of connected 'thing'. The Guardian then confused the issue even further by equating the term to the Internet of Everything (IoE). "In fact, the thing about the IoT is that it could mean almost anything. In some ways it is better to think of it as the Internet of everything."

I'm not sure whether it was Cisco that coined the term Internet of Everything, but Cisco has largely been responsible for it gaining currency. (According to Wikipedia, Cisco launched its first global re-branding in six years in 2013 with its 'Tomorrow starts here' and 'Internet of Everything' advertising campaigns). In so doing Cisco managed to muddy the waters as to the distinction between IoT and IoE.

And if you look at some of Cisco's IoE statements, there really seems to be little distinction. Cisco defines Cisco defines the Internet of Everything as "The bringing together of people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before, turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries."

That does go beyond simply a network of connected things, but I don't think it makes the distinction clear enough. It's expressed much better in this blog from Cisco's chief futurist, Dave Evans, in the Huffington Post, devoted to elucidating the distinctions between IoT and IoE.

He reveals that IoT now has an 'official' definition from one of the highest authorities on the English language, the Oxford Dictionary: "a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data." Good try, and it brings in another dimension: changes to the Internet itself, rather than simply connected devices that exploit it.

It is almost certain that changes to the Internet will be needed to cope with the billions of things expected to be connected to it. The IEEE has set up a new IoT working group, P2413, on the Internet of Things and I quoted here one of its members saying that new Internet standards were urgently needed because "with 50 billion connected devices by 2020. The Internet as we know it today is not ready for that."

Changes to the Internet aside, Evans argues that IoT is just one of the four dimensions - people, process, data and things - that constitute IoE. "If we take a closer look at each of these dimensions, and how they work together, we'll begin to see the transformative value of IoE," he says.

His blog is well worth a read, but he nicely sums up the distinction in his concluding paragraph. IoE is not about those four dimensions in isolation from each other. "Each amplifies the capabilities of the other three. It is in the intersection of all of these elements that the true power of IoE is realised."

In other words, big data (aka data analytics) to make sense of the masses of data that the 'things' will generate will be just as much a part of IoE as the devices that produce data and the networks that interconnect them, as will the applications and innovations that emerge to exploit billions of connected devices of all kinds.