Three infrastructure giants are looking to further the reach of operating support systems through an interoperability agreement designed to simplify the deployment and management process. Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huwaei said they have signed a memorandum of understanding to lay the framework for OSS interoperability across their respective offerings.
The initiative, dubbed OSSii (interoperability initiative) involves the three vendors agreeing to cross-license the OSS interfaces used for “multi-vendor network management.” This is seen as significant as operators are increasingly using multiple vendors for their network and support system needs.
According to the OSSii framework, the move is designed to simplify and reduce integration costs and speed up the time-to-market of new services. The agreement covers “fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from radio access, circuit core and packet core network management systems.” The venture is also open to third-party OSS vendors, though they have to join the OSSii to participate.
As for the terms of the agreement, the three companies have agreed to fees set on a 50/50 reciprocal basis, a term that extends to others that may join the initiative if they have proprietary OSS interface or interoperability test specifications, otherwise the fee will be on a “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” basis.
The need for greater control over OSS for carriers is being pushed by increased network usage, which is forcing carriers to dig deeper into their network operations in order to manage resources and enable new services.
“We have been encouraging OSS vendors to form interoperability agreements like this for a long time,” said Keith Willetts, chairman of the TM Forum. “We welcome this agreement and plan to support it in any way that we can.”
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter?
