Pump It Up!

Clearly, the Indian OSS/BSS market remains one of the most sought-after markets, given the unfolding of new revenue opportunities in mobile broadband due to the growing 3G spectrum. From content monetization to real-time charging and policy, convergence of LTE to the advent of the multiple connected subscribers or the growing importance of machine-to-machine communications OSS/BSS capabilities is playing and will play a major role in making these new models a reality.

In 2012, the telecom industry is being shaped significantly by consumer behavior and social media; and this means certain processes are imperative to enable new revenue models. The market opportunity given the explosion in mobile data and the demand for monetization of services is leading to an increase in BSS/OSS investment. There is a strong force of need and requirement for BSS/OSS industry to match up to the expectations and pump up the exerting pressure.

Pumping Pressure

The explosion of data is perhaps the most pressing issue for the OSS/BSS market. The demand to provide mediation for billions of records per day is a significant undertaking. CSPs are anxious to take advantage of the revenue opportunity; and vendors must be able to support their rapidly evolving requirements in order to survive. Support for these new billing models is also at the top of mind, as operators increasingly look to incorporate third party content. Business models must change to keep pace, but the ecosystem is complex.

There is also the matter of balance that needs to be considered. Balance between delivery models, such as software-as-a-service, and the balance between products and services offered. How scalability requirements are supported will determine which segments can be pursued, or more importantly which will remain. Vendors will have to decide if they want to support large clients or build a business supporting a higher volume of smaller customers.

On most CIOs' agenda, cloud computing is a top priority, given the potential impact on both costs and efficiencies. Also, CIOs confront the challenge of harnessing big data and turning it into actionable information for the business.

Simultaneously, the CIOs must consider the ongoing explosion of social media, since the demand for data-enabled devices is on the rise due to the overwhelming global adoption of social media. Hence CIOs are seeking BSS policy solutions to better understand usage patterns and design the right products as opposed to curtail spend as capping only reduces or eliminates potential business.

Despite a steady rise in mobile data subscribers and a surge in mobile data consumption, only a small percentage of content is being monetized in India. Hence monetizing data, video, and voice against a growing Over The Top (OTT) providers is also a major concern for the CIOs.

Also, harnessing capabilities for data settlements in a roaming/NRTRDE environment is also one of the prime concerns for the industry. Roaming & settlements in a data-rich usage world is evolving rapidly and will be even more apparent in an LTE environment-many operators are providing capped usage or fixed price all-you-can-eat per day kind of solution.

Transforming IT systems to support growing enterprise/wholesale business to tap into new growth business models and new revenue streams is a reason to worry. In the coming times, with the arrival of 3G and 4G, increasing role of policy control and online charging will be a challenge. More changes will come when we are moving from switched voice to IP voice in LTE.

Meeting the Demands

Abreast with high demand and high pressure, the industry is keenly working towards meeting the CIO's demands across the verticals. Manage, monetize, and optimize broadband traffic with policy control and real-time charging is the mantra for BSS/OSS players currently. The policy enforcement decisions in real-time should be based on services, applications, network resources, subscriber profile, SLA, & application to ensure end-to-end QoS & charging in real-time.

There is strong inclination towards solutions that are designed in compliance to industry standards such as WiMax Forum, NWG Standards, and 3GPP/3GPP2 standards. This brings flexibility in reducing integration challenges and dramatically speed time-to-market and associated development costs. Within a highly competitive environment, there is a need to optimize business processes to more efficiently price, package, bundle, and offer hybrid services. By turning data into insight, organizations can identify business risks such as customer churn, prioritize defaults and high-value premium customers, and anticipate new opportunities for cross-selling and penetration of new segments.

The BSS/OSS industry is currently moving beyond vanilla voice and mobile VAS services to provide multiple service (voice, video, and data) to enterprise, retail,and wholesale sectors. This requires convergent platforms for IP services, which can enable the operator to provide a converged view to subscribers and generate a single bill for all services.

Some technologies are readily being deployed by the industry to tackle the current challenges and prepare themselves for the future. Industry is investing in mobile data offload platforms.

Wi-Fi is becoming a preferred data-offloading technology for alleviating clogged 3G/4G networks. Scalability in Wi-Fi is also an issue; and to address scalability in Wi-Fi, operators require solutions such as AAA, business-critical functions that enable fast, efficient, and secure access to data networks and services. They also need a proven policy engine, which provides flexible policy-driven control decisions based on entitlements, dynamic state, device-type, location, and other parameters.

An intelligent packet core infrastructure offers centralized access and control to manage subscribers, deliver 3G and 4G offload, and create revenue-generating services that can be billed appropriately.

There is huge adoption of Content & Partner Management applications for partnerships with ecosystem which now comprises of device manufacturer, CDN, content aggregators, OTT, and apps developers.

More to Come

The trends that will continue to be major drivers in the OSS/BSS industry are the support for complex account structures, the demand for real-time processing and business visibility, and the need to support increased scalability. In the months ahead, compliance initiatives will also gather more steam as both functional and architectural requirements need to be met. Revenue assurance and the analytics that drive and inform business process will also gain prominence as a major market trend. Lastly, we also expect to see an increase in the demand for 'solution stacks', purpose built solutions infused with specific domain needs whether for a particular vertical market or for a specific performance needs such as high-scale requirements.

Despite the hiccups and growing pains which come with every new technology, LTE is certainly being deployed by a majority of the mobile operators. Although in India many operators are still trying to make money from 3G, LTE is already being planned or is at advanced stages of trial running. The implication is that there is a need to ensure that existing OSS/BSS can be interfaced seamlessly within the LTE environment.

Technology convergence between 'conventional' physical products and information technology is giving rise to emerging ecosystems, enabled through connected systems that provide new business opportunities. Machine-to-machine (M2M) and cloud technologies are gaining momentum and will become mainstream at a very rapid pace. OSS/BSS strategies will center around the need to build solutions to enable the CSP to offer news services around these technologies.

Another phenomenon that will drive CSPs to rethink their BSS strategies will be the rise of net giants influence on the digital content value chain and the emergence of the new 'third ecosystem' using mobile web apps which are built with open standards. With net giants working with operators to improve the billing experience-harnessing billing and charging is likely to be in the focus.