MOBILE APPLICATIONS: Integrating OSS and BSS

T raditionally, operations support systems (OSS) and billing support systems
(BSS) have functioned as separate divisions and were handled by different
departments. However, today, we are seeing that a number of factors (including
the drive to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), the increasing importance
of revenue assurance across the whole business, and the pressure to provision
services faster to customers) are contributing to the operators’ need to bring
the two systems together. Vendors must respond to this need and create an
environment that will allow the OSS and BSS to work together, presenting
operators with a choice of mix-and-match services from which they may select the
pieces of the jigsaw they need to create the picture that best fits their
business model.

Basically, operators want a framework that consists of tightly integrated products and modules that share a common user interface and middleware architecture

The integration of OSS and BSS systems is gaining more salience among the
telecom service providers in India. The competitive telecom market, along with
increased budgetary pressure, has put the service providers in India under
tremendous pressure to deliver value to the customers with the optimum
utilization of existing resources. The service providers in India are
increasingly looking to vendors for solutions that will allow the OSS and BSS to
work together along with choice of services that can best fit their business
model.

Greater Functional Integration

Operators are looking for a business management framework for their back-end
office billing systems that would tightly integrate with their front-office,
customer-management system and allow them the power to choose the most
appropriate applications to fit their business needs. Basically, operators want
a framework that consists of tightly integrated products and modules that share
a common user interface and middleware architecture. In a fiercely competitive
industry, carriers must be able to quickly bring new and sophisticated offerings
to market and update pricing structures on the fly. To do that, the billing
system and OSS need to be deployed and run by the same departments with greater
functional integration, in order to unite these two separate worlds as one.

For the aim of lowering the TCO to be realized and in order to provide an
efficient and effective back-office platform, the solution should provide an
extendible, plug-and-play architecture for pre-integrated products as well as
easy integration with third-party software applications.

Power to Choose

Presenting the operators with the power to choose their own low-risk
solution through a robust and pre-integrated selection of software solutions,
allows the operators to easily complete the jigsaw puzzle. These solutions
should be woven together with integration and extensibility tools which can help
operators to do the following.

n Generate New Revenue and
Increase ARPU By:

• Capturing revenues from evolving next-generation services
  by managing complex, multi-party content, and partner agreements

• Using an intuitive, pre-integrated customer-care
  front-end, the operators (via their call detail records (CDR)) can
  effectively up-sell and cross-sell services

• Offering customers the power of choice by allowing them
  to have both a prepaid and a postpaid account within a single system and
  manage the balance across and between accounts

• Providing the most flexible and sophisticated plans and
  packages through capabilities like rules-based rating and event-time unit
  credits.

n Lower Total
Cost of Ownership By:

• Using a cost-effective front-end strategy that allows
  operators the freedom to choose from a pre-integrated customer care
  solution, third-party COTS CRMs, or custom SI solutions–all with a single
  order/billing data view of the customer.

• Having a solution that is configurable and extendible by
  the operator, allowing the operator to change the behavior of the system
  without changing the core logic of the system.

• Through open, standards-based transaction APIs and a
  multi-tier architecture to enable faster and easier integrations.

Whether an operator requires an end-to-end customer care and
billing system that addresses its every need or solves a specific business
challenge, vendors must respond to market demands with a framework that allows
the service provider to select the pieces of the OSS/BSS jigsaw that best fit
their business needs today and in the future.

Rothin Bhattacharya
country manager, CSG Systems India Private Limited