In operational support systems, as in many other areas of the wireless business and even our daily lives, the Internet is changing everything, reports William Geraghty.

For the last couple of years, analysts and vendors alike have been telling operators that if they want to fully exploit the benefits offered by IP networks, they have to make some radical changes in their existing operational support systems ( OSS ). Traditionally, OSS has been the means whereby operators have monitored and controlled their circuit-switched networks, and as such has had little relevance to the wider business operation, hence its ‘back office’ tag.

However, the move to IP networks is changing everything. It is forcing the traditional notion of the telecoms network to be deconstructed and boundaries such as those between business modelling, service delivery and the network domain, to be redefined. The problem facing the industry however, is how to re-architecture networks in a way that will enable the potential of IP services to be fully exploited. The requirement is for a completely integrated approach to everything from OSS in the network domain, up through billing and policy control, to the application layer and beyond.

Once fixed-line operators began migrating to all-IP core networks and mobile operators began rolling out technologies such as HSPA and EV-DO Rev.A, it was never a case of if operators would adopt such a horizontal strategy, but rather when they would do it. Realising this, the vendor community has been preparing for the expected rise in demand for some time and at last, it appears the market for the next generation OSS is beginning to take off.

New Money
Driven by the potential profits from multi-play bundled services, FMC, FMS, mobile data services, companies such as BT, KPN, France Telecom, Vodafone, T-Mobile and other major players in both the fixed and mobile spaces are beginning to make their moves and operator spending on OSS is predicted to increase significantly over the next few years as network transformation gathers pace.

Indeed, a report just out from Insight Research, puts spending for operations and business support systems at $63 billion by 2012, up from the $42 billion the company estimates the industry spent in 2007. Significantly, this is double the amount Insight was predicting when it last looked at the sector in 2005. The new report, entitled Operations Support Systems 2007-2012, predicts spending will be concentrated in areas such as automated online billing, network asset management, configuration management and automated provisioning.

New technologies
Technologies with previously limited applications in the telecoms sector are also forecast to see rapid growth. The prime example of which is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which is predicted to become a big earner for vendors in the next few years. A recent report from Light Reading says that as a result of increasing interest from the mobile sector, the market for DPI systems is set to grow nearly 200% in the next four years, to more than $1 billion.

"Given the sheer volume of mobile subscribers worldwide, the mobile market is the real sleeping giant," writes Simon Sherrington, author of Deep Packet Inspection: Vendors Tap Into New Markets. "As operators upgrade networks with EV-DO Rev. A, HSDPA, and HSUPA, the volume of data will increase dramatically. The mobile market represents a major opportunity for DPI vendors." Sherrington predicts that by 2011, mobile operators will be spending more than fixed-line carriers on the traffic-management technology.

He adds that mobile operators are already showing more interest in the technology as they seek to manage and make money from the traffic in their networks. By enabling the entire contents of packets to be read in real time, it becomes possible to provide high levels of QoS, bandwidth-differentiated services, comprehensive real-time billing functionality, intrusion detection and legal intercept.

Early developers of the technology such as Olista and Arantech are now gaining traction in the customer experience management market, while others such as Volubill have used it in combination with its carrier interconnect experience, to provide real-time billing from deep within the network domain.

While DPI offers the means to collect data from all points in the network however, in most cases the content and format of that data will vary according to which elements of the IP network were monitored, and the need to provide a common model for mediation between the disparate elements is perhaps the biggest driver for rethinking the way OSS functions in a next-generation environment.

Indeed, the rationale behind service delivery platforms is that they are designed to break down the service silos by offering a horizontal architecture in which every element is integrated by a common set of protocols and standardised data formats, enabling individual resources to be used and re-used across a wide range of services.

For example, a single database of every customer’s profile and usage history shared horizontally across all services not only reduces the risks of data conflict and corruption inherent in siloed systems, but also enables operators to offer more flexible of services with far greater efficiency.

Information gleaned from a customer profile and passed through a policy engine can alert the network to the fact that this customer has paid a premium for guaranteed bandwidth and make the necessary network resources available in real time. But it all requires tight integration across the whole network architecture.

New strategies
Two strategies are beginning to emerge to address the mediation challenge and while both are vendor-driven, it will be the operators who decide which ultimately become ascendant.

The first is a standards-based approach to mediation based around a common set of protocols. The Telemanagement Forum (TMF) has worked on the problem of OSS integration for a number of years and while it has developed a standard Shared Information/Data (SID) model as part of the group’s Next-Generation OSS (NGOSS) roadmap, take-up was initially slow. Indeed, NGOSS-compliance is proving to be a barometer for the change in thinking taking place among service providers.

Twelve months ago, OSS vendors were reporting that operators were only paying lip service to NGOSS by demanding compliance in the RFP, but putting the issue on the back burner after the contract had been signed. They were more concerned with getting the new system up and running, and felt the longer-term OSS issues could wait. Things have moved on however, and OSS vendors are now touting NGOSS-compliance as a USP for their wares, a sure sign that operators are getting serious about compliance.

For those operators that are looking for a quick fix to integration however, most of the major vendors are offering integrated network inventory platforms for service fulfilment and delivery, which include integrated OSS , interfaces.  For the most part, the larger companies offering such solutions have gained the necessary expertise through acquisition of specialist vendors, sparking a wave of consolidation in the OSS sector, which shows few signs of abating.

IBM began the M&A feeding frenzy with its purchase of Micromuse at the end of 2005. This was followed a few months later when, following its acquisition of converged billing vendor Portal, Oracle purchased OSS vendor MetaSolve. Since then, the most significant deals came in 2007 when Amdocs paid around $230 million for Bath, UK-based Cramer Systems and Ericsson acquired Finnish software developer Distocraft.

As a result of these acquisitions, all of those companies, along with long-term OSS players such as Hewlett Packard and Nokia Siemens Networks, now offer unified OSS in one form or another. However, there are still a significant number of smaller vendors in the marketplace such as Visionael, Comptel and Netcracker to name but a few, who are offering similar products which they have either developed themselves or have banded together with other ISV’s in order to guarantee interoperability.

The question facing the industry, however, is whether operators will be happy to adopt a single-vendor approach, albeit with promises that even the major vendors’ platforms will be interoperable, or put their own systems together using a range of smaller vendors to source the platform elements.

The problem with the former is that operators face vendor lock-in, should promises of open standards compliance prove hollow. With the latter approach, operators run the risk of incurring the hidden costs of managing a large number of suppliers, however standards-based interoperability will put more leverage in the hands of operators who, in theory at least, will be able to swap suppliers almost at will.

There is one other change taking place in the OSS sector, however it has more to do with attitudes than technologies. The knock on effect of developing a new approach to OSS is that vendors are responding with IT-based solutions to integrate and enhance the functions of OSS , effectively shifting OSS from the network to the IT domain.

At the same time, OSS is becoming more closely integrated into the service and fulfilment layers above and is becoming an integral part of a wider business intelligence platform. Indeed, this process is presenting one of the greatest challenges the telecoms industry has faced, because it requires a radical change of mindset to shift responsibility for core network functions away from the network domain, but that is what will be required if OSS resources are to be fully exploited in the future.

“After all,” as a senior member of a network operating company recently remarked, “you wouldn’t want to hand responsibility for your business modelling to a network engineer, would you?”