RES: RES: Software For Telcos

Tue Jan 4 15:04:19 UTC 2011

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.