Technology companies and OEM partners

A value chain is often depicted as a linear model in which each company buys well-defined products and services from upstream entities, creates a well-defined set of additional value (products and/or services), and sells that to downstream companies or end-users. That waterfall model still applies of course, however, the dynamics and speed of innovation in the broadband and media eco systems are a catalyst for companies to increasingly collaborate with up and downstream companies. Companies in the value chain naturally fall back to the core competencies in times of big changes. Consequently, the traditional ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’ roles are much more getting a ‘partnership’ dimension to them.

There are 500+ technology companies that bring products to the market for media and broadband processing. Traditionally, much of those companies added some form of element control system (EMS) to their portfolio, primarily to ease the selling process and to give a minimum level of operational comfort to T2/T3 operators. Adding to that, the engineering effort to build a single vendor EMS is limited.

Today, as much of the products are virtualized, and therefore depend on third-party data center processing, third-party virtualization layers (VMs, K8S, etc.) or cloud instances, the landscape has completely changed. Any type of visualization, deployment and orchestration of functions requires an NMS that ties into many different technologies from different vendors, i.e. a DataMiner multi-vendor NMS. That is where many companies are changing strategy from building in-house, single-vendor EMS systems, into partnering with Skyline Communications to integrate products into DataMiner, or even to resell DataMiner as part of their portfolio. The rationale is obvious: technology companies can allocate their engineering staff on their core products and strengths, and as such accelerate new product launches. At the same time, their products are integrated into a state-of-the-art NMS for broadband and media that is the preferred choice of all their customers, including T1.