OSS in a multi-vendor environment

RCR Wireless News caught up with Nokia’s Jane Rygaard, head of CEM, Core and OSS marketing, at TM Forum Live 2014. Rygaard shared an update on Nokia’s OSS interoperability initiative. Interview below:
Jeff Mucci (RCR Wireless News): Jane we were talking about the requirement for interoperability in a multi-vendor environment, can you talk about where Nokia is focusing their attention to be successful in America, maybe in other parts of the world?
Jane Rygaard: I would say specifically if you talk about the multi-vendor environment, if you look at the world today, North America, everybody else, we no longer see single vendor networks out there so from an OSS perspective, we really need to be able to manage that multi-vendor environment without creating separate silos from each part of the network that is coming from different vendors. So it’s very, very key for us that we need to open up and be part of that, so this is why we’ve started the OSS interoperability initiative last year, and we’re now getting the contracts ready, we’ve got all the legal paperwork there, so that we’ll be able to share interfaces across windows without actually having to wait for a costumer project to start, because that’s the first part. If you don’t have the agility to be able to provide the projects and the multi-vendor integrations quicker, if we have to wait six, nine months before we get there, we’re not able to actually provide the business that is needed in the environment today in the mobile networks.
Mucci: So in terms of products you’re delivering to the market you mentioned performance management as a key focus point, can you expand on that again with respect to North America market and maybe some other markets around the world?
Rygaard: Yeah, so when you look at what you understand out of these even more complex networks we have talked about what happens when you have 2G and 3G and LTE and you add small cells to it, these networks become extremely complex so in order to manage them and understand the quality and be able to turn it around all to talk about the quality on the customer level, what is the customer perceiving in this network, then its important that we taking performance management from a level that we probably saw it five to 10 years ago where it was like I can get counters out of a network element, to really saying this becomes a dynamic tool of understanding how is my network doing in trends so performance management is very much moving into more and more real time, you know we need to be able to do the performance management real time, need to understand what the data is across the whole network and I will say if you look at the networks we have that is in North America, there’s definitely the pure scale of the network and all the geographical parts, you know how you manage the network across the whole of the U.S., the performance management and building that top layer to actually get it to work, has been for us, you know a key focus, and we have been working very much with our customers on the North America side in order to get the right approach to what is needed in the industry because we can’t do this by having…we need to do the development with our customers to understand the right requirements, so that it’s actually working in real life and not becoming a nice, exciting technology.