Seldom do people innovate in a vacuum. In fact, this bit of innovation came in part from years of Colin Ashford and Pierre Gauthier tossing ideas back and forth between themselves and to and from countless others in their years in various consortia. This bit of innovation comes in the form of a book, one about a new way to envision back-office solutions. “OSS Design Patterns: A Pattern Approach to the Design of Telecommunications," written by Ashford and Gauthier, steps outside their world of standard interfaces and information models and makes the case for an agreement across the OSS community on a core set of technology-neutral OSS design patterns.
The book advocates a pattern-based approach to the design of interfaces to operations support systems (OSS) to reduce the cost of delivering telecommunications management solutions. It also details more than a dozen OSS-specific design patterns that will help in the design of consistent interfaces to OSS applications. Each pattern is accompanied by examples of its implementation in two software technologies: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and Java Message Service.
The pair has taken their message to market as well through their own recently launched companies: OSS Evolution and OSS Wave, respectively. Ashford is a professional engineer and has held senior positions in Nortel with responsibilities for international standards and project management. Gauthier is the author of the OSS/J Design Guidelines and is star spec lead for JSR 91, the OSS trouble ticket API.
The two most important elements of any new service are, arguably, price and usability. When Pac-West launched its turnkey service enablement environment called Telastic last fall, it must have had that in mind. Telastic makes it easy and less expensive to enter the VoIP space.
Vic Bozzo, president of emerging technologies at Pac-West, was hired in July 2010 with a mission to redefine what it meant to be a carrier’s carrier. Telastic is his and his team’s definition. Bozzo joined Pac-West from Factor Communications where he was CEO. Factor specialized in cloud-based communications services. He also is a (youngish) veteran of IP communications having worked for NexTone, Communications, ITXC and Voxware.
Bozzo and company extended the obviously necessary virtualized network components such as carrier infrastructure, application capacity and turnkey applications to include least-cost routing, vendor management, revenue protection, numbers management, call detail generation, fraud control and peering — all as a service. Infonetics Research said the demand for managed and outsourced services continues and combining them with infrastructure as a service is an idea that just might have legs.
