Building A Solution

Almost all telecom service providers today are spending significant amounts
of resources on upgrading their OSS and BSS applications in order to gear-up to
face the technological challenges of next generation services. Market analysis
firm 'OSS Observer' corroborates this in their forecast: “Global OSS
spending in the commercial market is forecast to grow from $13 bn in 2005 to
$18.7 bn in 2010 at a 7% CAGR”. This trend therefore, implies that there will
be large scale solution integration constituting best-of-breed products along
with the associated customized components. However, a solution is only as strong
as its weakest link and in this respect building a complete end-to-end OSS/BSS
solution is a truly challenging proposition.

“Architecture in any form has to align to the business needs of the service
provider's operations. The business process architecture should lead to the
solution architecture, which in turn captures the integration and information
(data) architecture. This is then deployed using the SLAs targeted by the
operations through a solid technical architecture,” says Abhijit Lahiri,
corporate head, Tech Mahindra, BSS solution, integration, and design. “The key
measure of how good the architecture is, is to meet the KPIs or KQIs that have
been laid out in the solution architecture and these can be measured through
performance tests in the production environment following the technical
deployment of the solution.”

Application Areas

The figure below reflects some of the application areas that are touched
upon during a typical OSS/BSS implementation.

Indeed the very fact that a single business process may require data to flow
through half a dozen different applications makes the overall architecture
highly complex. However, the overall success of the integration also depends on
the non-functional requirements, which if overlooked may lead to adverse
consequences. “The performance, scalability, flexibility, availability, and
robustness of the architecture are some of the essentials, which are part of any
architecting exercise and these need to follow industry guidelines that are
evolving into various standards” quips Abhijit.

Frameworks such as TMF's NGOSS and standards such as OSS/J, which suggest
the use of Web services, XML, and J2EE based technologies provide considerable
guidelines for effective solution integration following a modular approach and
are aimed at removing the dependency on any specific vendor or a specific
technology. Thus, a properly designed solution may infact make adding or
removing of services or applications a lot easier and in effect reduce the time
to market. In this respect the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is now being
presented as the way-to-go by various vendors and system integrators to make
solution deployment more organized.

Most project managers have to deal with various interfaces of their product
with other applications and third-party systems. However, there is always a
tendency to expect that the application on the other side of the interface would
provide the data in a form that keeps the customization in their own area at a
minimum. This expectation can lead to integration issues, which will be
identified only at an advanced stage of the implementation and the situation can
become even more complex when the boundary for achieving a particular
functionality between two applications is not clearly defined. Solution
architecting is therefore an important exercise where issues such as these can
be settled by taking an informed decision, keeping the 'Big' picture in
perspective and analyzing the various aspects involving the interface.

A new CCBS implementation typically involves a host of applications as shown
in Fig 1 above and for each of the application areas there is a project manager
to drive the product implementation. However, these project managers by and
large focus on their product area alone and are not really involved in aspects
such as bandwidth allocation, disaster recovery, load balancing, high
availability, scalability, domain partitioning or even the storage area
architecture among others. These areas are however, critical for the overall
health of the solution and need to be clearly accounted for in the overall
deployment architecture. “An application might be very flexible and feature
rich” says Sharmila Hiranandani, senior manager, Convergys,” but as mergers
and acquisitions substantially increase subscriber bases, it is imperative that
the solution can handle extremely large volumes of data without compromising on
the performance throughput of the system. Architecting therefore needs to strike
an optimal balance between the application(s), operating environments, and the
business process to deliver a solution to meet the demanding BSS/OSS needs of
today's carriers.”

Requirements

The figure below describes some of the aspects, which need to be considered,
while architecting an OSS/BSS deployment. Some pointers are also provided on the
aspects that need to be considered, while arriving at the architecture for each
area.

Architecting an OSS /BSS solution is therefore a multi-dimensional activity
where one needs to evaluate many factors over and above the application
architecture. Thus, areas such as server architecture, database architecture,
storage area architecture, network architecture, disaster recovery architecture,
and security architecture need to be reviewed critically since these areas have
far reaching effects on the overall delivery of the solution. These days when
natural and manmade calamities are not uncommon, designing a proper architecture
of the primary site as well as the disaster recovery site is critical. The
associated challenges in synchronizing data between the two sites also need to
be defined clearly. Likewise the architect needs to consider the development
environment, making sure that it is isolated from the live environment and
ensure that the needs of the development team are also well addressed. “A well
defined Solution Architecture essentially takes Systems Integration to the
ultimate goal of Solution Implementation. The importance is especially high in
mission-critical revenue generating environments such as OSS and BSS that are
responsible for money-by-the-minute,” says Angshuman Chakrabarty, product line
manager with Redknee Technologies.

Monitoring of resources is another important area that needs to be considered
since most large installations involve different geographical locations although
the core management function may be centralized. Management of network including
bandwidth usage, servers, and other devices need to be planned carefully since
these components may be from multiple vendors and use different technologies and
operating systems.Thus, solutions
that are based on open standards and having no single point of failure are
highly recommended.

Even though the basic architecture may be arrived at during the initial
stages, the detailed solution evolves over a period of time and hence, the
architecture needs to be refined as the program progresses and the integration
requirements are better understood. An offshoot of the architecting exercise is
also the development of the complete end-to-end data model involving all the
products. This artifact can help streamline a lot of inter-application
interactions and is a very important reference material for future use as well.

Architecting an OSS/BSS deployment therefore, requires consideration of
multiple domain areas and involves close interaction of the architecting team
with project teams both from the application side as well as the network and
infrastructure side so that an end-to-end audit can be conducted in order to
eliminate any weak link and making the overall solution more robust. This
exercise may even lead to refinement of existing business processes either to
make the process itself more efficient or to avoid undue customization of the
core components leading to savings in cost as well as time for the operator. The
spate of M&A activities in the telecom world open up additional integration
challenges and these emphasize the need for an effective solution architecting
exercise.

Sreenivas Kalva, director in Convergys' Professional Services Group sums up
the situation aptly “There is more to rolling out new services quickly than
the technical capability to do so. For long-term profitability, carriers should
consider BSS/OSS systems with a solution architecture that enables marketing
flexibility, superior customer care, and operational efficiencies when scaling
to meet demand and extending for future services.
While industry and market trends are key factors for carriers when
considering ways to differentiate their service mix, their BSS/OSS environment
will be a key factor in their success to implement those services.”

Himanshu S Mahanta solution
architect, Tech Mahindra

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