Currently on top of the network each and every medium large organization has a whole stack of OSS systems covering different sections of the E-TOM model.
We got network planners, commercial and technical order management systems, service and resource inventories, network assurance and monitoring platforms, complex provisioning and activation engines.
As a person making the living from that industry I wonder what will be the impact of SDN on all that?
In my personal (I have to state twice personal) opinion SDN will bridge the gap between the BSS and the network and many of those complex OSS systems will become redundant.
At the same time it is fair to say that the complexity never disappears and as stated in RFC 1923 it just shifts from one place to another.
In that sense one possible scenario is to shift from the OSS to the BSS and mostly to the SDN controllers and intelligent clients.
Another one is that SDN will fail to prove itself as a carrier grade solution (there are many reason this to happen) and some of the ideas behind it to move straight into the OSS world. In this case the OSS will become more complex.
Stating this I truly believe that most of the effort in direction Openflow controllers and the initial marketing push of the ONF made a lot of noise but actually failed to prove themselves as a carrier grade network solutions. At the same time there are IETF initiatives such as the i2rs, abno and pce that are again an SDN and that look much more reasonable. This will be the second wave of SDN and this wave and in my opinion this wave is that will simply some of the current OSS and will change the industry.
What do you think?