Ericsson, Huawei and NSN have joined forces for a new initiative aimed at increasing interoperability between OSS systems, reducing integration costs and shrinking time-to-market.
The companies announced Monday the signing of a MoU for the Operations Support System Interoperability Initiative, known as OSSii, under which the triohave agreed to cross-license the OSS interfaces used for multi-vendor network management.
OSS integrates a variety of telecom network technologies from several equipment vendors as well as the telecom operator business systems, making the integration of OSS complex and costly.
By supporting multi-vendor interoperability between the OSS of all the participating companies, OSSii will promote competition for network-level OSS systems by reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time-to-market for new services, the companies said.
The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from radio access, circuit core and packet core network management systems.
“The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,” said Peter Patomella, head of OSS business at NSN. “Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative.”
The cross-licensing and interoperability testing will also be open for third-party OSS vendors if they join the OSSii, the companies added.