Criticality of operations and business support

The telecommunication industry marketplace is seeing momentous changes as a result of convergence. And the panoply of services that a service provider has to offer to customers at all times has raised the sweepstakes. With the convergence of voice, data and information technology infrastructure, service providers must constantly confront change to continue delivering and managing their services at a profit. The increasingly interactive nature of content, whether games, downloadable music, feature enhanced movies or any other innovative digital experience, brings challenges to service providers and their partners all along the value chain. While content may be king, content without control quickly becomes an unmanageable mess. Because rich media services are often the result of collaboration between multiple content and application developers, outside agencies and go-to- market partners, several imperatives emerge:

• Maximize leveraging of content assets throughout their lifecycle
• Securely and accurately provision, track and bill for services
• Control value chain settlements
• Avoid revenue leakage across multiple platforms and service environments

This calls for an Integrated Service Framework that encompasses hardware, software and services, along with industry-leading technologies from third party partners. Together, the framework has to deliver a dynamic and flexible integrated operations and business support system (OSS/BSS) for streamlined, end-to-end management of front office business processes and back office operations and integration for service providers across the spectrum.

To be sure, service providers have to make the shift to next generation networks and services in real quick time. The OSS chosen has to offer a proven path for coping with change and maximizing efficiency in service assurance, fulfillment and billing for traditional and next-generation communications infrastructure. And through automation, integration and advanced features, this OSS has to increase service availability dramatically, fill more customer orders more quickly and boost the revenue generating ability of billing systems, while also reducing total cost of ownership.

Many service providers have developed overlapping network operations activities over time through, for example, mergers, creation of new business units and introduction of new infrastructure. Separate groups managing IT, IP and network infrastructure is one example of the problem. Often multiple network operations centers are in place as a result of these factors, leading to impacts on the entire service life cycle. Further, each of these groups may have chosen different processes, different vendors’ applications or done their own development.

Communications services continue to evolve, as service providers seek competitive differentiation and sources of new revenue. Increasingly, IT is part of the service. This is the case with mobile data and content services, where the service itself is delivered via computing servers to terminals that are explicitly or implicitly computing devices, and with voice over IP or Internet services. Managing such services is complex, as the IT and telecom communities have evolved toward different management interfaces and different levels of instrumentation in their infrastructure. Further, many service providers have created multiple operations groups for different services or infrastructure types, such as IT, IP and telecom equipment.

These factors add cost and inefficiencies to the operations of the network and services and make ensuring service quality a challenge. Billing for such services is also complex. Current billing infrastructure may not be flexible enough. This is particularly true when services are billed on a usage basis, rather than just a flatrate basis. Usage data is not standardized as it is in the pure voice world. Further, to offer such services to prepaid users mandates that their usage be accounted for in near real time. The new usage data itself is also a gold mine of information about services, customers and their usage patterns and therefore must be available for fraud detection, revenue assurance and business intelligence systems.

Ensuring customer satisfaction for these, as well as most other services, means ensuring quality expectations are met for each customer. Customers are more and more concerned about quality in a competitive market. Yet the customer's perception of quality may be quite different from a service provider's internally measured metrics. They may be linked more to order handling, billing and call center experience, even factors outside the service providers control (i.e. applications or edge devices the customer has chosen), as much as the actual service availability and delivered quality. All these factors must be somehow accounted for to

Market conditions today show that the telecom industry is moving out of a period of retrenchment and into a new phase of growth, where new service and infrastructure investments again become a priority. Thereby arises the need to adapt quickly to changes, specifically: rapidly introducing and withdrawing services, changing network infrastructure for efficiency, changing staff priority by service and customer and making best use of existing OSS infrastructure by adapting it to new needs.

Companies, such as Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd., Reliance Communications, IDEA Cellular etc. in India, are increasingly turning to OSS players like HP for full OSS solutions. Bharti Cellular, India's leading GSM operator, opened its Centralized Network Operations Center last year. It is all about consolidation of operations centers. As operations centers are brought together, for reasons of both cost and effectiveness in managing cross-technology services, these operations centers need tools and service spanning broad ranges of infrastructure from IT application management to optical transport. And as business process, services and infrastructure evolve, it must be easy to evolve the OSS as well. Network infrastructure management is becoming critical for service providers and the way and they will continue to seek ways to increase customer satisfaction and simultaneously adopt new technologies will lead to the introduction of new value-added services, and pare costs in the long run.