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MOBILE APPLICATIONS: Integrating OSS and BSS

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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:

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  • 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

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