Shrink-Wrapped Solutions or Consultancy Buy-In

One of the consequences of globalization is a greater degree of skills specialization and homogeneity of products. In modern corporations, it is increasingly easy to relocate and move between different host countries , often working in the same (or a similar) job and for the same organization. This means that software development skill sets can be used to move fairly easily between different geographical locations. In other words, software developers can become quite specialized. In a similar fashion, the vast range of commercially available NMS products share a great many functional characteristics. So, we see a great many products competing for a finite number of customers. Software developers with broadly similar skill sets create these products. Increasingly specialized software development skill sets may have a downside. This is particularly the case as the number of developers in vendor organizations is reduced. Those developers who remain may not have a broad enough vision for effectively creating NMS products.

Even without reduction in numbers , skill set specialization also has its own problems when adopting solution engineering, such as:

• Not taking an end-to-end or customer-type system view ”for example, a developer creates a Frame Relay virtual circuit, verifying that the data is written to the database but not the network (a customer generally sees the network as the true database and is more interested in verifying that the connection is created in the network).

• Not taking consideration of a feature beyond the current release cycle.

Also, NMS products (and NEs) are increasingly homogeneous, often offering base-level features such as fault and performance management. Many vendor (and system integrator) organizations make sizeable sums of money in selling consultancy to network operators. This consultancy is often geared toward assisting a network operator in incorporating a given NMS product into its workflows and business processes. In effect, if consultancy is offered as part of a product sale, then the vendor is trying to add differentiation in this way. This seems a cumbersome and very expensive approach, given the relative ease with which modern software tools can be used to create highly useable software.

A better deployment model results if NMS products are well-designed with characteristics such as:

• High-quality (or standard) MIBs

• Generic software components , such as GUIs that allow the management of generic connections rather than technology-specific objects, whether they be optical light paths or Frame Relay virtual circuits

• Flow-through provisioning features with thin software layers

• Adherence to standard NBIs (discussed in the next section)

We believe that products fulfilling these requirements have a much better chance of fitting into enterprise networks, workflows, and business processes, and standing on their own merits. In other words, incorporating such products into large enterprise networks should not be such a daunting and expensive task as is perhaps the case at present.