OSS/BSS: On Its Toes

Today, many areas have become critical for an operator's positive growth. OSS/BSS is one of them. It drives the customer experience and serves as an intriguing tool for monetizing traffic, offerings, and products that an operator sells.

Last year, the telecom industry was shaped significantly by the service quality & availability, customer behavior, ease-of-use of services, and social media.

The service providers focused on customization and convergence across disparate networks and applications. This was majorly contributed by BSS/OSS converged and transformed platforms. The mobile data explosion and services monetization are also adding to OSS/BSS investments y-o-y.

The biggest challenge is to keep abreast with the stiff coampetition. The market is not big enough for all to gain and prosper. The OSS/BSS community deals with many challenges apart from keeping tough fight to be in competition. What is critical for operators, has automatically become an area of potential for the OSS/BSS community.

A Close Look at the Market

Amdocs kick-started the last fiscal by completing the acquisition of Bridgewater Systems Corporation, a publicly held provider of policy management and network control solutions. Amdocs signed multiple business contracts with wins across the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region. Amdocs, by the end of last fiscal, also signed a multi-year extension of its existing software license and service agreements with Comcast Cable Communications.

Comverse's mobile number portability business line resulted in its significant gains for tier-1 clients. They gained through selling their MNP module to these operators. Besides the huge mobile market, the growth in Digital TV (DTH) market helped them in expanding their BSS footprint in the market.

In FY12, Comverse also gained from the expansion and managed operations at Videocon Mobile and a product upgrade and expansion at one of our tier-1 mobile clients in India.

Aricent credited its achievements in its various projects by being involved in the fourth-generation technologies, customer experience management, data analytics, and service operating models around M2M throughout the year.

Ericsson strengthened its focus on OSS/BSS from last fiscal. Ericsson completed the acquisition of Telcordia for $1.15 bn early this year. With this acquisition, Ericsson gained a prominent market share of prepaid charging in India. Telcordia's strongest business line in MNP has also come into Ericsson's kitty. Apart from this, Ericsson signed a contract with Mobifone to consolidate its 6 Regional Network Operations Centers (RNOC) in Vietnam into one centralized NOC in Hanoi. For this, Ericsson will drive an OSS transformation program by implementing a unified network management system.

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Elitecore has bagged major contracts this year with tier-1 operators such as Vodafone, airtel, Aircel, PT Telkom, and XL Axiata. Their key contributing projects were charging gateway function, Wi-Fi offload, AAA for 3G Network, and enterprise billing. The main sectors which contributed to their revenues in FY12 included 3G packet core projects, policy management, and Wi-Fi offload.

Tech Mahindra also had many key wins to its credit. It won a managed services contract for 3 years with an option of extension of further 2 years from a licensed provider of fixed and mobile telecommunications for BSS Applications. In this, Tech M is delivering the rapid releases, postpaid, fixedline, and MNP projects. Tech Mahindra has partnered with the customer in a project to replace the billing system for the broadband operator on WiMAX 16e network along with a managed service contract for 2 years for their OSS/BSS systems.

Tech Mahindra also signed a MoU with Sitronics India to promote the OSS/BSS solutions. In the framework of the agreement, Tech Mahindra will promote the OSS/BSS solutions of Sitronics India in the Indian market and both the parties would mutually explore and leverage their expertise in development, implementation, and support of different IT solutions. Apart from this, the company also tied up with Redknee to jump-start Telco-MVNx, a solution that will provide MVNO/Es with a low-risk and flexible approach that can be launched in the market in a week.

Subex also launched various products and solutions last fiscal gaining a substantial market presence. The company won multiple contracts for its ROC fraud management and revenue assurance solutions with various operators including tier-1 African operator, Idea Cellular, a greenfield operator in APAC, and with a middle eastern mobile operator. The company also received the International Standard Organisation (ISO) & Information Security Management System (ISMS) accreditation, ISO 27001, to support its work for BT last fiscal.

SAP was also not behind in launching various solutions last fiscal such as file lifecycle management, policy management framework, and address data cleansing softwares. SAP also announced real-time analytics solutions in the cloud last fiscal. What the Future Holds

The need for a convergent OSS/BSS platform for rapid development and deployment of new services and applications has become inevitable for the operators. It is critical to offer the end-users customized services with improved quality of service (QoS), which is only possible with a convergent OSS/BSS platform supporting an end-to-end unified customer- and service-level view. Billing transformation, application consolidation, policy control, and charging are the areas for future growth.

Given the volatility of environment in the past 3-4 years, even a slight delay in launching new and improved services can be extremely detrimental for the telecom operators. Hence the speed to market becomes crucial and so does enabling BSS/OSS stacks.