Operators are worried about being relegated to pipe providers, about consolidation and competition from disruptive, fleet footed, innovative competitors, suggests Priscilla Awde.

 

So they are re-inventing themselves, concentrating on providing high quality of service (QOS), and meeting demand for multimedia, easy to use and access applications: essential if they are not to be left behind.

Doubters have only to consider the Apple effect: both versions of the iPhone appeal on so many levels as does the ecosystem, in which all devices are automatically co-ordinated and updated. Given what they want, consumers will flock to buy.

To prevent churn operators must react faster; launch and tear down innovative next generation converged products quickly; put customers at the heart of their organisations and deliver personal, high quality services where and when needed. They must change their internal culture and business processes to become more efficient, flexible and cost effective. Speed and agility are difficult to achieve since few service providers have joined up or automated systems but instead, islands of disconnected legacy systems and siloed databases.

Automating and streamlining network based Operational Support Systems (OSS), and customer facing IT Business SS (BSS), are fundamental to transformation. Integrating these disparate sides of the business delivers the kind of service levels customers expect, slashes time-to-market whilst reducing expenditure.

“The main driver for integrating and automating OSS/BSS is to cut opex and capex,” believes Mark Nicholson, CTO at Subex who says the challenges are growing. “New content based services are pushing the need for integration as more complex services are delivered to handsets. On the revenue side, how usage is tracked and billed depends on better integration and data sharing between application servers, networks and customers - from the OSS to BSS and down to the final bill.”

Yet integrating and automating the two very different sides of telcos, traditionally divided by culture, expertise, performance expectations and rarely sharing common definitions, is difficult and costly.

“The challenge is how systems support business strategy and what sort of operational environment is required,” says Steve Lewis, lead consultant, Analysys-Mason. “The message is getting through but there is still reluctance because the problems are often too difficult to solve. There is so much inertia within telcos it may take a long time to organise changes which are always complex, time consuming and expensive.

Best practice is to coordinate OSS/BSS, CRM (Customer Resource Management), billing and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), integrating them into a single, fully automated, open IT based system. Keith Bergeron, director of OSS solutions for HP suggests: “Everyone must understand the process and technology implications of integration. Procedural and business processes must be served by integration and the same case made for both the OSS and BSS sides of the business.”

Deciding where and in what to invest may be hard but integrating and automating the OSS/BSS functions to create a seamless path from the initial order through provisioning to final bill seems fundamental. The main driver is to become more competitive by focussing on the customer and fulfilment sides and the return will be in business agility, efficiency, reduced capex, operational and management costs.

“Operators need to differentiate themselves with QOS and new products introduced faster – difficult with hardwired systems. They need flexible web enabled services and catalogues,” explains Tony Kalcina, executive director of Clarity. “The product of the future is customer self management: end users can create and define services via the web from order to activation, fulfilment and QOS. This depends on having an overall seamless automated end-to-end OSSS/BSS environment. The question is how operators can automate service delivery, strip out human costs and empower subscribers. It is all about automating service delivery, so all supporting systems must work in harmony.”

Integrating OSS/BSS is further complicated by differences in the vendor community. While OSS suppliers are relatively small, specialist telecoms networking experts, the global BSS vendors have roots in the IT sector. However there have been significant acquisitions with BSS companies buying OSS businesses to gain the necessary expertise to deliver the desired end-to-end integrated and automated solutions. “There is a new interest in OSS by mobile operators which was not there before. They had little real time monitoring and not much focus on OSS but are now changing to concentrate on customers’ experience, QOS and investing in fulfilment to prevent churn especially in saturated markets where growth is slowed,” continues Kalcina.

Speed, flexibility and the growing demand for web based self provisioning can only be supported in automated and integrated OSS/BSS stacks. With the exception of greenfield and newer providers, most operators have disparate, siloed and proprietary legacy systems which rely on inaccurate manual processes and which support neither speed, efficiency or QOS. Led by the TeleManagement Forum (TM F), the industry is developing the requisite open standards, common definitions and terminology to eliminate possible confusion between the two sides. It is also creating the tools and equipment to reduce integration costs, support interoperability and streamline, automate and integrate OSS/BSS platforms.

“In siloed operations, OSS/BSS, customer care etc. are all treated separately but transformation is removing vertical silos and creating a horizontal, linear IP world – a big change for operators,” explains Tony Poulos, head, revenue management sector for the TM F. “The convergence of OSS/BSS is led by the move to IP and the driving force for mobile operators is that they will get more, higher margin data traffic. Transformation is a major but necessary overhaul to make OSS/BSS in tune so operators can do everything in the IP world which can be done in the switched world.”

Most operators now require vendors to supply pre-integrated, interoperable solutions which can be easily incorporated into existing architectures using standards like service oriented architectures (SOA), and the TM F’s eTom, TAM and NGOSS. Yogen Patel, VP product management at Ceon says: “Now vendors are willing to invest as operators are adopting new standards based systems, demanding compliance and moving away from big monolithic architectures to modular systems.”

Rather than a big bang method, service providers are moving cautiously towards next generation converged OSS/BSS, integrating the new with the old systems which still support most of their business. This incremental approach mitigates the risks and, by linking investments to individual projects, operators can see savings as they transform. Evolution rather than revolution is the preferred approach according to Cassandra Millhouse, director of product marketing at Amdocs. “The biggest challenge is moving to a new environment whilst still operating as usual - operators want to sweat existing OSS without throwing out what they have. They are moving away from large scale projects and are deploying modules to automate smaller pieces of the pie.”

Traditionally services are closely connected to network elements and can be traced to the resources providing them but that is no longer the case with new service delivery platforms (SDPs), or SOAs which further complicate OSS and BSS. Now services must be automatically linked to infrastructure in real time and IT elements interoperate with OSS/BSS. “The new, integrated OSS/BSS stack is designed to support all services converged or not, is extensible and adaptable to cater to future applications,” explains Sanjay Mehta, senior director, product marketing for Oracle. “Operators are creating a new systems estate for next generation services which are service oriented architectures and in time, will transition legacy services into the estate.”

This slow migration to a new environment Mehta says means: “the new architecture can be seen to be working, saving money and creating a return on investment. Operators want to build new stacks with new skills and a retrained workforce with everything streamlined to optimise time-to-market and minimise costs until they can migrate existing customers to the new environment.”

Global markets and fierce competition are making it impossible for telcos to succeed unless they replace the slow legacy systems in which data is often inaccurate and inconsistently applied throughout the OSS/BSS stack. In all product launches, design, attributes, pricing and definitions are done in the front end but that data must be accurately reflected throughout the system. Provisioning, fulfilment, billing and everything in between must be automatically updated before products are launched. “Currently this is all done in labour intensive spreadsheets where systems are not automated, there is no systematic modelling or tools to define products and updates are done manually,” explains Patel. “Errors drift in, so what ends up in the updated catalogues is not exactly the same as what the marketing department defined.

“Now all manual processes in the creation and dissemination of product data can be eliminated. This shortens the cycle of getting products to market, creates full, clean and effective product definitions which are automatically sent to OSS/BSS. Defining new products, updating systems and making products available on websites can be done in hours. Once applications are integrated into infrastructure we see evidence of between 50-80% reductions in time to market.”

Operators continuing with legacy systems will lose because they are too slow, less innovative and their costs too high. Lewis at Analysys-Mason concludes: “There will be a crunch point where operators either make the transition or just become wholesale pipe providers allowing MVNOs to provide the ‘whizzy’ services.”

 

 

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