NICE, France -- TM Forum Live! -- OSS vendor NetBoss is here in Nice pushing a new strategy and expanded portfolio that might include an acquisition in the analytics space.

CTO John Lee declined to comment on the M&A speculation, but confirmed that analytics capabilities will soon be added to the company's expanded offering to flesh out a new strategy that's focused on highlighting the link between network usage and financial opportunity. (See NetBoss Expands OSS Portfolio.)

NetBoss, which was spun out of Aviat in 2010, has traditionally been a supplier of service assurance tools to network operators. Now, though, it's building on that base with a range of strategic partnerships and a proposition that should capture the attention of any network operator wondering about the impact of OTT traffic on its network.

In a nutshell, NetBoss is pulling together information from multiple network performance and service assurance tools using its existing correlation tool (called Statewise), integrating information from BSS and other third-party systems, and presenting multiple views of the resulting information in dashboards designed for different teams (marketing, operations) within service providers.

That's not an unfamiliar approach, but the views NetBoss is aiming to provide are intriguing. Lee talked about unveiling the "opportunity cost" to operators of what is happening on their networks, using OTT traffic as an example. "We want to show operators the value of what they are not doing," he stated.

Using the impact of OTT traffic as a prime example, Lee said his company is developing "OTT contention metrics" that will enable operators to "relate dollars and cents against bits and bytes," and be able to figure out the financial impact of adjusting the traffic running over a network. "If a network is full to capacity, operators need to know if it's full in a way that is making money or not… they need quality indicators of the traffic on a network from a financial perspective," he added.

For NetBoss to be able to help operators achieve that level of visibility and understanding, it needs analytics capabilities: The company's next news item might just be about where those capabilities are coming from.

— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading