Copying and distributing are prohibited without permission of the publisher
A new reality dawns as communications service providers start to outsource their OSS
26 September 2011
Until recently, an operator would never have considered allowing the beating heart of its organisation, the OSS, to be managed by a third party
Read more:
Amdocs
OSS
BSS
OSS/BSS
Until recently, an operator would never have considered allowing the beating heart of its organisation, the OSS, to be managed by a third party. However, time to market and cost control pressures mean that operators should consider a managed services approach to OSS right now. Ben Weinberger and Ron Wolf of Amdocs explain the innovation that is required to deliver on the promise of OSS Managed Services and how operators’ needs have changed. Co-sponsored feature: Amdocs
|
|
|
|
Ben Weinberger is head of the OSS division at Amdocs which encompasses products, services and business professionals, along with global responsibility for Amdocs OSS business. He joined Amdocs in 1991 and since then has been responsible for large-scale business, projects delivery, acquisitions and leading a variety of product groups.
|
Ron Wolf is president of the Global Strategic Sourcing Sales and Marketing organisation at Amdocs and is responsible for global business development, sales, marketing, and strategy, driving Amdocs’ growth in the Managed Services market. He has more than 25 years of experience helping operators develop strategy, transform operations, create new market opportunities and integrate people, processes and technology. Prior to joining Amdocs, Wolf was a senior partner at Accenture within the firm’s Communications Industry Group. |
Originally seen as a worthy area of network IT that kept the lights on across the network, OSS has now become fundamental to the profitability of an operator. Yet current systems are creaking under the strain of the vast increase in network capacity demand arising from new services and applications. Many simply weren’t designed to address the time to market and cost efficiency demands of today’s operators and are being inefficiently force-fitted to support current operations. That has to stop. It’s unsustainable from both cost and performance perspectives and there are further issues for operators to overcome. Many suffer from using aging systems that have been ineffectively integrated with others as consolidation has brought multiple operators – and their OSS functions – together. System numbers have proliferated and some carriers are now running thousands of systems that are not fit for purpose.
A brand new business model emerges
A clean sweep is needed to retire overlapping and obsolete systems but that transformational task is a huge burden for an operator to undertake. Increasingly, outsourcing OSS, in the same way as network equipment and BSS have been outsourced, is looking attractive for operators. However, the ability to provide this level of holistic service across the OSS estate hasn’t existed until very recently and it is, effectively, a brand new business model.
“The main driver to change is that they have no choice,” says Ben Weinberger, head of the OSS division at Amdocs,. “Their in-house built systems can’t cope with the scale and magnitude of change in the world.”
For that reason, Weinberger’s colleague, Ron Wolf, president of Global Strategic Sourcing at Amdocs, thinks growth of the OSS Managed Services market will accelerate rapidly in the next few years. “We’re already seeing demand for OSS managed services which is just the tip of the iceburg in terms of capabilities that could be used here. As consumption of data services continues to rise, service providers are recognizing the direct impact OSS resource management has on service quality and the resulting customer experience. Establishing modern and efficient OSS operations is becoming ever more important, and providers are seeking specialized vendors that can do it better than them. For that reason, we’ll see tremendous growth in this area.”
Weinberger agrees: “This can be a market of hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” he says. “I don’t see it as a long term dream. I predict we will have engagements in this field in two to three quarters.”
For Wolf, that size of opportunity is created by the pressures operators face in terms of time to market for new services and reducing their cost of operations. “Until recently, OSS was considered sacred and core to the operations of a company,” says Wolf. “It was seen as the heartbeat of the company so they didn’t let anyone come close to it. However, as time has moved on, new tools, software and techniques, along with the experience we as a managed services provider have gained in the BSS, domain, can be translated much more easily into OSS. The pressure on operators is now to do more with their OSS. That opens up a new business model and an opportunity to start to look at outsourcing OSS as a viable alternative.”
Wolf points out there are three areas where OSS managed services come into play:
- OSS Business Process Operations which encompass all the business and technical processes related to network planning, fulfilment, assurance, inventory and workforce management
- OSS Application Management which addresses all activities that enable efficient and effective development and usage of OSS
- OSS Hosting which consists of services to support, hosting, operations and optimisation of the IT infrastructure for OSS
The benefits, in addition to shifting from a capex-based model to an opex-based model, include regular system upgrades as part of the managed services package. “The ability to leverage ongoing vendor system and business process innovation for results-driven execution is the attraction for service providers,” says Weinberger.
OSS Managed Services are IT-centric
However, recognizing the appeal of OSS Managed Services, operators shouldn’t see this discipline as parallel to outsourcing of other operational functions, notably network operations and maintenance. This is an IT-centric market and as such, OSS Managed Services shouldn’t be confused with network managed services. “Network managed services focus on assurance and failure mechanisms while OSS Managed Services will focus on the business processes and applications such as inventory and fulfillment and not on network equipment. The processes start in ordering and end up activating the network,” explains Weinberger.
Wolf has a similar view. “At a high level you can look at network managed services as the engineering side of the coin and the OSS Managed Services as the IT and process side,” he says. “If we dig a little deeper, network management focuses on configuration and operation of the network equipment itself; it’s a day-to-day engineering layer. OSS Managed Services deal with development and maintenance of the operational layer of OSS. If we look at all the OSS Managed Services activities, they’re basically the same across all the different network technologies. Although vendors deploy different technologies across the engineering layer OSS Managed Services can be more common or holistic which allows us to build in a lot more efficiency and integrate support for all the different network technologies out there.”
Amdocs’ OSS Managed Services portfolio brings together the unique breadth of IT-centric capabilities and telecoms-specific experience that operators require. Amdocs Global Strategic Sourcing offers three key managed service solutions for the end-to-end management of complete OSS domains.
- Order to Activation managed services – Amdocs manages the end-to-end order to activation process for all service types, handles fall-outs and provides application management services for the IT systems supporting this critical business process. The services include all related business process operations and hosting services.
- Inventory managed services – Amdocs handles the end-to-end inventory management process, including data integrity management, network device type management, asset lifecycle management and inventory data cleansing and migration. In addition, it provides application management services for all the inventory systems, as well as the related business process operations and hosting services.
- OSS application management – Amdocs handles all activities that enable effective development and usage of OSS across planning, fulfilment, assurance, inventory and workforce management systems, according to business and operational requirements. Services include software development, testing, migration, training and support for both Amdocs and non-Amdocs applications. Whenever it makes business sense, Amdocs also provides managed transformation services for the fulfilment and inventory domains. Such transformations can usually be funded by the capex and opex savings achieved through pre- and post-transformation efficiency and quality improvements.
To help operators assess the potential benefits they can achieve from OSS managed services, Amdocs offers a set of benchmark services to measure current OSS status and the room for improvement in each business area. “Claimed benefits don’t mean much if they don’t meet or exceed specific SLAs and can be translated to specific KPIs ,” says Wolf. “
The ability to provide that granular insight into the advantages of OSS managed services, along with the experience to deliver on the potential, are critical elements in attracting operators to choose this approach to transforming their OSS. “The most complicated thing isn’t dealing with where the industry is today and where it wants to be, it’s crossing the bridge,” explains Weinberger. “We are talking about very complex transformation programmes, so the ability to execute with minimal risk and maximum ability to predict results is critical. We provide that ability.”
The value OSS Managed Services provide doesn’t stop with a successful transformation. “After the system is in production, the ability to deliver ongoing high system performance cost-efficiently is vital,” concludes Weinberger. “The managed service provider also needs to excel in day-to-day system operations. That’s the secret sauce.” GTB