I'd have to give that some thought. What strikes me, though, is the apparent conflict in some circles that such a pursuit would entail. Half the world is trying to make their networks stupider, and the other half, smarter.
The two or more, depending on how many flavors of smart you come up with, are not fungible to one another, hence creating even greater divides between the various flavors of bandwidth "pools." In the end, this reduces the level of what is commonly called bandwidth's move to "commodity" status.
When the author in your referenced article lists Sigma and SS8 he is not pointing to something that is uniquely optical. These are companies who have done Operations Support System (OSS) products for legacy networks, as well as new development for next gens.
Others who would make it to your list are among those who historically had a stake in making networks smarter (and paying for themselves when such was fashionable). These traditional OSS vendors are the SS7 types, the ones who do local number portability, inter-company billing, the accounting shops, network management software vendors, subscriber databasing, enhanced services (AIN/IN), etc.
Ultimately, however, I think that new developments in optics, and new wavelength routing algorithms (used to effect bypasses) will overshadow any enhancements that can be made to today's fundamental models, if we are truly speaking about optics. And these, in turn, will require yet additional, more optically-oriented variants, of OSSes. And as in any other paradigm, the management and OSS products that are necessary to run those new networks will lag by some measure, until some time has lapsed after the physical and link layers prove in, beyond concept.
But legacy has a way of not going away. They will be tweaking today's primarily-SONETized model (run what protocols you may, they still package them in SONET containers for the most part) for some time to come.
Beyond the optics stage you still must deal with the user oriented "services" that must be managed and groomed. And billed for.
The following article covers some of these while listing a slew of players in this space, and suggests that there is a trend to placing these platforms in ASPs as opposed to housing them in central offices and ISP pops.
teleknowledge.com
Thanks for bringing this topic to the board. |
