Telcordia’s Silver Lining for AT&T

Implications: 1.While there is always the desire to move away from Telcordia’s operational support systems because of cost, inefficiency, and complexity, the commonality of the old OSS solution is facilitating the merging of the long haul, SBC, and BellSouth networks. 2.There are even some engineers at AT&T who cannot even foresee the time when Telcordia’s deeply embedded base will totally disappear. 3.While the dependence on Telcordia by AT&T will continue to diminish in general, a much larger company entrenched with OSMINE will have a harder time of getting rid of it compared with Verizon and Qwest.

Analysis: AT&T has an entire TIRKS organization, apparently divided up in San Antonio, TX and San Ramon, CA. The people involved there do the TIRKS, NMA, etc. kinds of work.

While the integration of the three infrastructures at AT&T will take some time, changing the varied network elements will be fairly simple. The tougher part is managing these alterations. Although there might be different flavors, the original AT&T, SBC, and BellSouth have all used OSMINE. Despite the fact that in the past, there has been movement away from some of the OSS pieces, certain things can still be recovered.

With AT&T wanting to get the consolidation done as quickly as possible, the service provider has found it advantageous to provide the operational support systems the same way in multiple locations. The similarity between the SBC and BellSouth networks also makes the integration fairly simple and relatively easy to accomplish.

Interfacing with the long-haul portion has not become a major hurdle as long as the lines are not crossed. However, any attempt to take the regional part of the company into the local part, along with management over the same pieces, makes the situation a bit more difficult.