Prior to the actual event, the theme of pulver.com's Voice on the Net Conference in Phoenix earlier this month was the maturity of the voice over IP (VoIP) market. By the time it was over, the theme had wandered from perestroika and presence to money. It shifted from the “killer app” to the killer application platform. It fawned over session initiation protocol. Always, however, it wandered back to the question of market maturity.

There are several indicators of a maturing market. One is that despite the recent downturn in the market, companies still find the money for research and development. Other indicators include the move of protocols and prototypes from the lab to the market and the growing interest by atypical parties — in this case AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo. All of these were present at VON.

Another indicator of a maturing market is a focus on operations support systems (OSSs). Not that OSS in the VoIP and next generation network space is any more mature than it is for the CLEC market, for wireless, or cable or any other space. It isn't. The same debates abound.

Best of breed or end-to-end? Plug-and-play or integration? One thing is certain: Service providers want answers.

“Software drives us crazy. It is always too slow and always too late,” said Fred Harris, vice president of design, applications and services at Sprint.

Sun Microsystems believes it has the answer to making software and back-office systems easier for service providers: dump the telco tools and use as much enterprise technology as possible.

“Non-reusable integration work has been a huge waste of time and money. We have had nothing but broken promises of cheaper, better, faster, and it is the end user that pays,” said Philippe Lalande, a program manager at Sun.

Lalande said frameworks like the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) developed by the Tele-Management Forum are not conducive to NGN management and VoIP of the future. “TMF has a general framework in NGOSS, but the big difference between the TMF and the Java initiative is we make strong technology choices,” he added.

NGOSS was developed to advance a vendor-neutral, plug-and-play architecture for OSS, an elusive goal thus far that service providers and vendors say is their highest priority.

However, some are beginning to lose faith. “Plug-and-play is not possible,” said Michael Peterson, chief technology officer at Linguateq. “Once you have plug-and-play, you reach a point where there is no creativity. We believe integration is the way to go.”

And so it goes.

“Plug-and-play is possible. It comes about after a leader is established in the marketplace,” said Mike Schwartz, executive director and chief OSS strategist of operations solutions at Telcordia. Naturally, Telcordia sees itself in that leadership role. The company's philosophy on OSS has remained resolute. The carriers of today will be the carriers of tomorrow, and they need a migration path to the next generation network that does not compromise performance.

Telcordia offers a strategy for migration that includes modernizing user interfaces to existing systems, adding new systems as adjunct processors and — where legacy systems can't be adapted — replacing them.

This requires system integration and plug-and-play solutions.

Agilent has its own idea. It's a fully integrated, smart OSS ecosystem (see figure).

“Right from the start you need to figure out how to build an OSS that doesn't turn into a nightmare,” said Stefan Pracht, marketing manager of NGN Operations at Agilent. The ecosystem addresses what Pracht called a multiworld made up of multiple vendors, multiple elements and multiple protocols by applying a blend of network and service management, including test-and-measurement functionality.