As good as major hardware providers are likely to be at also providing operations support systems, we have seen that politics and proprietary stubbornness have been too big a hurdle for them to overcome.

And as multi-vendor as hardware providers may be or think they are — or have promoted themselves to be — when it comes to software, few self-respecting service providers have allowed themselves the luxury of believing it. The very idea simply goes against every competitive instinct a network manager or operations manager has.

However, bit by bucket-filling bit, hardware vendors are becoming multi-vendor by default as they continue to consolidate. Lucent Technologies, which is steadfast about the openness of its network management and activation software, will become immensely more multi-vendor as it melds with Alcatel. And last week's big news about Nokia and Siemens combining their service provider business will lead to Nokia's OSS platform also becoming more multi-vendor in an instant.

Even if it is only one vendor at a time, becoming intimate with another major vendor's interfaces and schemas compounds the likelihood that a hardware provider will be acceptably multi-vendor when pushing their software solutions. It may not do much for the relationships between non-merging vendors and may make them dig their proprietary heels even deeper, but service providers may start choosing hardware vendors that can talk to each other in more ways than one, and they may be more comfortable with the idea that deploying Alcatel and Lucent hardware or Nokia and Siemens hardware still makes them a multi-vendor operator. This, in turn, would make them more comfortable with the idea of turning to them for software.

Along these same lines, service providers also have been reluctant to consider the idea of outsourcing their operations and network management functions to a vendor that would have to be monitoring, managing and supporting its closest competitor's equipment. If those competitors are now one company, there goes that argument.

Nokia is closing in on the heels of Ericsson and Lucent in this area of outsourced operations support, and joining with Siemens can only help their situation. Combine consolidation with the continuing efforts of the TeleManagement Forum to standardize interfaces across northbound and southbound systems, and you have a recipe for open network management systems.

We'll see soon enough if consolidation changes the service provider perception of hardware vendors as software vendors. And we'll know if hardware vendors feel the vibe as well if this endless vendor roll-up starts to include software vendors, as it did, albeit unsuccessfully, in the late 1990s.