HAHA! Good joke! That was true some 30 years ago... Actually, I think the problem is quite different. Big telco's network is a very complex thing - well, you all can say, Internet is too... But if we see some "similar" business like aircraft-defense and professional video market, we see some similarities: there are a lot of tricks and "non-documented standards" that make those software a kind of mistery for foreigners. Put in other words, software knowledge is not enough, you must have a deep understanding of that business and the history of the system itself... Takashi -----Mensagem original----- De: Randy Bush [mailto:randy@psg.com] Enviada em: terça-feira, 4 de janeiro de 2011 11:49 Para: Takashi Tome Cc: NANOG Operators' Group Assunto: Re: RES: Software For Telcos
Generally, top telcos use software made by top telco's software vendors... of course :-)
in my miniscule experience, they have large masses of engineers with unrequited NIH and roll their own as much as possible. after all, who could make something suitable for their oh so special needs. randy
On Jan 4, 2011, at 9:04 AM, Takashi Tome wrote: [snip]
Put in other words, software knowledge is not enough, you must have a deep understanding of that business and the history of the system itself... [snip]
This is the case 100% of the time, regardless of how many "top" developers/coders think otherwise. Regardless of market segment. The last "top telco" I dealt with enough to get a feeling for their systems was using PeopleSoft and a gaggle of the things that come along with it: $200/hr PeopleSoft consultants. They also had a walled off fiefdom in engineering that no one else could touch except for maybe a few select people in the NOC using Rational Rose which contained all of the engineering docs and much of the information the NOC really needed to troubleshoot anything of substance (I'm remembering an incident where I had a circuit down from them with no light on my end, yet the NOC kept arguing that they had a link on their end......turned out they were looking at their copper port and didn't realize it went through some other box, which has completely unmonitored ports, to turn it into single mode fiber to send across the city to me and only engineering had the documentation to show this). I'm not saying that I'd be the right person to even make the initial design document for a large telco management system, but I can tell you that once you've seen how it's currently being done you'll realize that many of them don't appear to have the right person either. Just in my small (meaning millions of minutes a day, not 10s of millions) voip business, we've not been able to find much off the shelf software at any price that would help with much of anything short of your standard generic business type apps. We're using a combination of open source packages, some lightly modified, and some internally developed software. Its not optimal, and I think it would break at even 5x our current head count, but there isn't enough of a business case to go to some roll-your-own-with-consultants-base-app like PeopleSoft or SAP.
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Takashi Tome wrote:
That was true some 30 years ago...
That's still true today. There's an insane amount of in-house stuff still kicking around, for various reasons, some reasonable, some not so much.
Actually, I think the problem is quite different. Big telco's network is a very complex thing - well, you all can say, Internet is too... But if we see some "similar" business like aircraft-defense and professional video market, we see some similarities: there are a lot of tricks and "non-documented standards" that make those software a kind of mistery for foreigners. Put in other words, software knowledge is not enough, you must have a deep understanding of that business and the history of the system itself...
I believe that would be the intersection of COTS and NIH ... "Yup, we're using $SOFTWARE, but we have a few in-house customizations..." cheers! ========================================================================== "A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to avoid getting wet. This is the defining metaphor of my life right now."
participants (3)
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Cat Okita -
Daryl G. Jurbala -
Takashi Tome