View from the top: Adan Pope of Telcordia
Adan Pope: the provision of OSS and BSS may be undergoing
its own transformation, changing the model of how IT supports
the communications industry
The communications revolution. The transformation of telecoms. Choose whatever phrase you prefer, but it’s undeniable that radical changes have already taken place in how we live and work. It’s equally undeniable that operators are playing a critical role in enabling those changes. But is that role confined to its current position? Is all of the new value inevitably in the hands of new entrants, from gaming companies to digital music retailers? Questions about what telecom service providers can become, and how they get there, point to a need to reassess the future of the commercial and operations management in telecoms – BSS/OSS.
And while the transformation of telecoms has typically been presented itself as a challenge to the traditional operators, enough has now changed for that same challenge to be felt among the supplier community. The net result is that the provision of OSS and BSS may be undergoing its own transformation, responding to new kinds of challenge and opportunity, and changing the 30-year old model of how IT supports the communications industry.
Reconsidering the BSS/OSS landscape
Microsoft buys Skype. Google builds out a wholesale FTTH network. Apple becomes the US’s largest music retailer. Traditional telecoms makes all of these possible, and yet by contrast, in this transforming industry, operators themselves remain – relatively speaking – untouched. None has yet turned into a bank, or a retailer, or a media company notwithstanding the channelling of others’ content to content viewers. Few have yet to derive significant revenue from branded app stores or similar attempts to climb the value chain.
Partly this reflects success in the core business activity of running large, complex networks. Partly it reflects the amount of continuing challenge in evolving networks and services to keep pace with demand. But partly it reflects still-untapped opportunity. I believe that opportunity exists, and is located in creative new ways to combine capabilities from both sides of the BSS/OSS boundary. And it’s that need that is changing the landscape of the supplier community.
Earlier this year, Telcordia participated in a collaboration project with the Telemanagement Forum that goes to the heart of the change – and points to the nature of the new opportunity for operators. That project addressed a critical concern: how to avoid simply being commoditised out of the value chain and how to accept the reality of the over-the-top provider model, but also find a way to become part of it, to realise the potential in the network and its controlling capabilities.
The collaboration team including Microsoft, Telcordia and Portugal Telecom created a platform to do something totally new. It effectively enabled the formation of a sort of real-time consortium, giving all the players in the value chain an opportunity for revenue, and the customer a richer choice of experiences from which to choose.
By combining typically separate aspects of BSS and OSS capabilities, the system enabled the service provider to play an active role in presenting, in real time, an offer that the customer could purchase. A temporary bandwidth upgrade that would enhance their requested experience, in this case of an over-the-top video service, but it could just as easily have been a high definition 30 frames per second option on a massively multiplayer gaming session. It presented something that gave a real-time and contextually-relevant choice to the customer, that the service provider would be able to fulfil instantly, thus generating incremental revenue.
Real-time leveraging of the customer relationship that an over-the-top provider has with its customers is something new and is only enabled by understanding the untapped value of a BSS/OSS combination. The intersection of policy, charging and OSS has never been as clear as it is now. Customer choice, not just in what to buy, but from whom, provides the roadmap and maybe even an offer prototype of how different parties in the supply chain could work together and could prosper from collaboration.
A number of factors point to OSS as the central enabler of the next step in the transformation of telecom. One: today’s customer relationship contains more, more varied and more frequent experiences. Ordering, fulfilling and maintaining services, let alone any retail or routine customer service experience, and providing consistency and predictability is a central part of what OSS provides and must be assured.
Two: those experiences span an ever-greater spectrum of front office and back office functions, which highly frustrate customers with the visible handoff between each. A reassessment of where a BSS/OSS boundary is useful, and where it is not, requires openness, expertise and creativity on both sides.
Three: those experiences will more frequently involve a number of participating companies. In real-time, it must be possible to share highly detailed information about a customer, their services, their use of the services, as well as the options for enhancement and the execution of changes. These are all the more valuable — and differentiating — where they rely on real-time network or configuration changes.
New markets: new opportunities
The sort of value chains that we are now seeing are creating multiple different buyers for BSS/OSS, with quite distinct needs, and different priorities, and that is contributing to the transformation in the BSS/OSS supplier community.
For example, the discussion about whether or not there is a new and expanded role for OSS in cloud services really “depends”. Not so much on the technical challenges, but more on the commercial structures of cloud services providers. The telecom service provider offering cloud-based platforms sees OSS in a different way than the cloud-based application provider. Those targeting consumers with cloud-based applications will have different view of the priority of service level agreements than those targeting businesses. Understanding the relevance and value of cloud on OSS really depends on your commercial starting point, and the arrangements you have with other vendor partners – from applications to infrastructure.
The rise of network outsourcing arrangements also challenges the traditional view of what OSS is for. Now, there is a clearer requirement for OSS to deliver economies of scale, and to directly provide differentiating capabilities, not simply enabling ones. The role of industry standards may well change for this group of OSS operators, as they seek to balance interoperability with the need to create a competitive edge by doing something over and above industry expectation.
The way in which OSS is considered and procured is changing. While there remains a market for niche-functionality players, there are new and quite distinct opportunities, and some growing up to do perhaps: to support the non-traditional players, who need the capabilities of OSS, but view it much more directly not as a cost of doing business, but as an enabler of the end customer’s lifestyle. We’ll see more collaborative programs, comprising functions from right across commercial, network and customer service teams, and through the BSS/OSS boundary. In short, a more direct imperative for BSS/OSS to come up with new ways to add value to a connected, always-on and mobile lifestyle.
Under the weight of a fragmenting supply chain, mobile ubiquity, and the market-of-one demands of the digitised consumer, the BSS/OSS supplier community as we see it today is being transformed, not simply consolidating. Those who see the difference will embrace the necessary challenges to convention, the increased demand for creativity and innovation, in return for new opportunities and customers, and a part in writing the next chapter of the transformation of telecom. It’s an exciting place to be. GTB
Adan Pope is CTO and CSO of Telcordia