Next Generation Networks are the basis of converged IT and telecom services. Realising the vision of a flexible service based economy needs agreements to be forged between the IT and the telecoms industry to create a converge infrastructure for applications, management and services. Service Oriented Architecture is creating great interest in both the IT and telecoms industry. Will this be the long sort after solution to the persistent problems of OSS integration costs and application inflexibility? Drawn from across the IT and telecom industry the speakers assess the benefits of SoA and whether they will be the answer to the SOS from the OSS industry.
Panelists:The initial hype about hot new products that will change the way we think about management is over. It is time to ask whether autonomic principles will have a significant impact on managing networked systems. The panel will provide a fresh assessment of technology, research and business aspects regarding autonomic management/self-management, and it will discuss directions and implications of the approach. Questions to be raised include: In which settings can self-management achieve a reduction in operational costs? Do customers and administrators really want and trust self-managed systems? To which extent are services that are built on p2p technology inherently self-managed?
Panelists:The Open Source movement has touched almost every sphere of software technology that we know today. The OSS/BSS world also has seen significant application of Open Source software into their products. Major carriers and service providers are still wary of migrating to Open Source software for critical applications though most of them are involved with Open Source initiatives in one form or the other. For most carriers and service providers the top-of-the-mind issues are scalability, security and performance. Some key questions raised by them are,
Though Open Source software is much less expensive and tests have proven their efficacy, system integrators have not rushed headlong into the open software fray. Most SI's, though excited about the Open Source revolution, are still waiting and watching where this initiative is headed. This panel discussion focuses on some of the key issues and advantages of Open Source platforms in business impacting applications such as OSS/BSS solutions. The panel also tries to determine the bearing of Open Source software in critical applications such as OSS/BSS solutions.
Panelists:Over the last years, the Management community has witnessed a shift away from information models and protocols towards value-added management services that improve the configuration and fault management of a distributed system, or optimize its performance. However, whenever we try to articulate the value of Management, it turns out that we neither have the methodologies, nor the tools to help us assess where we as a discipline are on the maturity curve and how 'self-managing' the systems we build actually are. Metrics such as 'total cost of ownership' or 'number of servers per administrator' are often overly simplistic and essentially focus just on symptoms, not on the true factors that impact the value of management. It is therefore hard, if not impossible, to quantify the value that the investment in management technology actually yields actually yields, and there are no hard metrics available that facilitate the comparison between management systems from different vendors. The panel will address the following issues:
Existing management protocols include SNMP, TL-1, Syslog, CORBA, and XML-based protocols including IETF Netconf. While many protocols were initially intended to address specific functions, most have been extended into other areas in recent years. As a result, we often have competing protocols to address the same need, resulting in a confusing technology landscape. This panel will address: