OSS/BSS: Carving a Niche

While most of the wireless industry's attention remains focused on the segment's large and growing selection of gadgets, some of the market's greatest innovations are set to spring from the operational support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) space.

Growth Drivers

Growth in OSS/BSS deployment is currently led by new entrants. The industry has not seen major transformation projects coming from Indian players, but it has set expectations and directions for 2011 and 2012.

Amdocs has till now emerged as the most sought out preference for OSS/BSS softwares by telecom players. Service providers like Vodafone and Datacom have preferred Amdocs for most of its OSS and BSS solutions like revenue assurance, mediation, fraud management, interconnect billing, etc. Amdocs's postpaid and prepaid softwares are being used by telecom companies like Vodafone and Datacom aswell.

Amdocs offers customer care, billing, and order management systems for telecom carriers and internet services providers. It is moving ahead of time in offering NGN and communication OSS solutions that are addressing issues like network planning and design, service fulfillment, and service assurance.

Tata and Aircel have been using Comverse for prepaid and postpaid, while MTNL and Reliance use Intec for these solutions. Airtel and Idea use Keenan and Ericsson, respectively. Oracle, on the other hand, has been providing solutions in self care and EBPP to operators like Tata and MTNL. Oracle's Unified Inventory Management (UIM), a new standards based inventory management application that provides communications service providers, carriers and network operators with a real-time, unified view of customer, service, and resource inventory.

Intec has strong positioning in domains like interconnect billing, mediation, CRM and order provisioning and has operators like Reliance, Tata, Bharti, and MTNL. Subex has a strong foothold in fraud management, and has been providing solutions to operators like Bharti, Reliance, Idea and Aircel. Telcordia offers their core OSS software systems that remain an integral part of many network operations. Telcordia continues to evolve these systems, imbuing them with features that add business value to existing customer installations.

Emerging Trends

The Indian telecom scenario is no less exciting and operators too remain very much aligned with global practices. In fact, Indian service providers/operators appear more proactive in being the early adopters of enabling technologies. Elitecore has succeeded in partnering an array of deployments for various services that range from high-speed network data services to NGN services for customers. NGNs will allow carriers' networks to cost effectively support a new suite of sophisticated services by building on core competencies related to traditional transport services. In addition, a unified and consistent NGN approach will help reduce costs by eliminating the inefficiencies of current service-specific, proprietary, and non-reusable solutions. NGN approaches will also reduce the time-to-market and lifecycle costs of offering new services. Finally, NGNs will enable carriers to deploy advanced services, allowing them to remain competitive as well as expand their capabilities to enter new markets.

The OSS/BSS market is keeping pace with these advancements in the market. Service convergence is the buzzword now. The need for increased levels of personalization, easy business enablement, and higher levels of scalability, is urging a quiet revolution in the way OSS/BSS systems are delivered in the market. Emerging standards like LTE and platforms like IMS are creating seamlessly integrated, standardized communication infrastructures. 4G technology is revolutionizing the perception of wireless, by providing seamless connectivity with unimaginable data speeds. Convergence of mobility, social networking and communication platforms is going to be the future of the industry.

Tough Nut to Crack

The market is witnessing a lot of buoyancy, which is led by the emergence of new business models such as cloud and an immediate need to address the key challenges. The OSS/BSS industry is an extremely competitive marketplace and service providers cannot just focus on standard COTS offerings. The OSS/BSS industry requires more value add for communication service providers, and therefore it requires a strong domain insight that is not focused on the product itself but on having a wider vision. There is a need for a holistic view of seamless customer experience, and it cannot be addressed solely through COTS products.

A major challenge is that OSS/BSS decisions are still taken in silos with no or little integration with business. This has led to costly overruns and creates a challenge for CIOs in gaining adoption of their IT. Cost will always be a factor and managed services will add more value to OSS/BSS industry customers. It is essential that the OSS/BSS industry goes along with its core expertise, and takes along experts in managed services to provide managed services to communication service providers.

Blessed with Growth

Indian OSS BSS market clearly remains one of the most sought after potential territory given the recent developments in BWA. As noted by several leading analysts, the market has already observed double-digit growth (CAGR) in the recent past. Their forecasts for the next couple of years also seem quite encouraging. Now more operators/service providers in India want to turn to integrated, scalable convergent platforms in order to mitigate risks and get rid of complexity and bring down capex and opex.

Akanksha Singh
akankshas@cybermedia.co.in