Is this just a load of BSS?
What we really need in the technology zone these days are more acronyms right? I mean, what’s the point in listing out all those cumbersome terms in full to just slow us down?
Critics have suggested that creating acronyms just for the sake of it is a blatant marketing ploy to allow vendors to ‘label’ a term in the hope that it will become some sort of de facto standard and possibly benefit from viral web-driven proliferation.
JASA (just another stupid acronym) was apparently first used on Twitter by one Stephen Hay in an exchange focused on POSH (plain old semantic HTML). Hmm, what do you call an acronym within an acronym? Is it a super-acronym maybe? Let’s not go there.
Why do I blog thusly? Well I follow lifecycle management plenty, but I don’t follow the telecoms business with as much devotion. So there I was reading about BSS/OSS and I just thought hang on a minute.
OK it’s hardly rocket science, but BSS/OSS is Business Support Systems / Operations Support Systems and it is an oft-used term if you happen to be talking about fulfillment software for communications service providers.
Hence my web travels led me on a path to connect this type of software to the telecoms industry and read about the companies that work in this space. Convergys and Ceon (actually I think the former just bought the latter and that’s why I was reading about it) seem to be prime suspects for this type of jargon. You can read about BSS on ZDNet.co.uk, but it’s mainly white paper materials.
The reason BBS is my acronym du jour is that I was doing some work last night related to application development for Unified Messaging (UM) environments oops! – agh! There’s goes another one! Anyway BSS isn’t BS when it comes to convergent communications scenarios as it, allegedly, helps manage the entire product lifecycle across all network domains.
With all the doom and gloom about share prices and recession this week maybe we should look for areas of optimism huh? Ok here goes… Africa is still a growing market, particularly for communications services – and this of course especially includes mobile. As African nations deploy more layers to their comms infrastructures, perhaps they will also bring in UM and developers who work in this space will need to embrace BSS.
Look, I’m just trying to be optimistic OK? It’s a nippy October Wednesday and my boiler is broken. Surely the bottle must be half full somewhere.