The OSS Blog Our views and opinions on all things OSS

BLOGGER: GUY MAIDAN

I recently attended the Future of Cable Business Services event, a one-day conference hosted by Light Reading that explored the progress of cable operators in the U.S. business telecom services market – it was informative, and enjoyable.

What I found most interesting, perhaps surprisingly, was a panel that had very little to do with the future of technology, called Cable Customers Speak Out. The panelists were small and medium business (SMB) customers of cable companies – actual customers! Joseph McGovern, the president of NuTech Healthcare, was cheered as he detailed his priorities, selection criteria and business philosophy of what he wants and doesn’t want from his telecom service providers.

Green Lenses: Very Influential

Reliability is of supreme importance to Joseph, simply because if his phones don’t work, he loses business. It’s also important for him to have a partner to support him: one that will provide excellent service, high quality, and high speed with no hassle, because his sales organization mainly works with iPads connected to the back office. All of these factors were important to him, but when he looked for a service provider he was looking through different lenses –  green ones.

When he realized that switching to a different service provider would save him ten thousand dollars a year, suddenly the right path became clear. True, he wants to use tools that will help him grow the business, such as SaaS applications and cloud storage, but he will use them only if they are within his budget, or offered for less.

To make money in the SMB market, service providers, whether they are cable operators or incumbent telcos, need to be extremely efficient. The lesson? Efficiency is the key to success in the SMB market. Those seeking higher margins should go up-market to the more complex world of large enterprises.

Guy Maidan is a OSS solutions marketing manager at Amdocs – follow him on Twitter

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So I have reached a startling conclusion! After many years working in the telecommunications industry and after trawling the internet I find there are very few simple introductions to OSS.

One of the challenges describing OSS is the lack of a common language – for instance, depending where you live, a mobile network can be described in many different ways … mobile, cellular, wireless etc… This is one of the first barriers to telecommunications – the need to learn the many and varied sets of local terminology.

I was looking for something that will simply answer 3 basic questions: “What is OSS?”, “What does it do?”, and  “Why is it important?”. So in this short blog I hope to shed some light on this topic and in future be able to point friends and colleagues to this piece to explain what I do for a living.

What is OSS?

In order to provide service to its end customers a telecommunications provider, or as I will call them the service provider, needs to connect lots of clever bits of communications equipment, servers, fibers and wires together. In order to cost effectively plan and ‘run’, on a day to day basis, this connected world of spaghetti they need some help in the form of software. This software is called an Operations Support System or OSS for short. It’s a bit like you and I using a Sat Nav in the car – we plan our trip (analogous to planning the network connectivity) and then at some point we take a wrong turn and get told “turn around when possible” (analogous to network alarms and faults). The Sat Nav is the car’s equivalent of an OSS and the driver the operations staff – the people who use the OSS.

What does it do?

One or more of the following:

• Manages the incoming orders and makes sure all the correct things happen in the right sequence, if things go wrong it can let people know – also known as Order management, workflow or order orchestration
• Creates a physical network and the service (i.e. 20Mbit/s broadband) which is then ‘turned on’ – known as Service planning, design, provisioning and activation
• Maintains a record of all network equipment and services, by reading back the network state discrepancies can be highlighted – known as Service and resource management, inventory and discovery
• Generates a list of equipment and service alarms and faults – known as Service assurance and fault management
• Manages the work of people ‘in the field’ and on-site equipment – known as Workforce and asset management

Why is it important?

Today service providers need to find ways to offer new internet and data services faster and at a lower per unit cost. This is mainly driven by increasing competition from internet based organizations and consumers’ thirst for more and more bandwidth.

Legacy OSS software is not integrated and costly to change; therefore there is an increasing need for new flexible, integrated and quick to configure software that easily supports features such as product bundling and automated order processing.

Market watchers and analysts, such as Analysys Mason, show that this is a hot area for service provider investment; having spent over $20Bn on software in 2009 they predict the growth in this software segment to continue.

I hope you have found this brief guide helpful and you have gained a little more understanding of what OSS are.

You can post comments here or alternatively you can join in the conversation on twitter (@davidojames).

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These four tips on improving time to market for service providers resulted from interviews and careful statistical analysis of Amdocs 2011 survey of 125 senior executives at wireless, wireline and cable providers from every region in the world.  Service providers can create a lean, effective, ready-to-go and automated operation by using the following four steps to implement a “service factory approach”:

1. Centralized product and service catalog

Today everyone is struggling to stay on the same page. There are too many BSS and OSS systems, and these systems need to communicate with each other. There are also too many catalogs, some of which overlap and are not aligned, and on top of this, someone needs to configure the process between the related systems. This where the centralized product and service catalog comes into play.

The centralized product and service catalog is a master database that serves as a single point of truth and the single entry point for all product and service information. It addresses the specific needs of multiple stakeholders to define and price

product offerings and customer/resource-facing services, including technology options. It does so while taking advantage of all the benefits of a single common data model, making B/OSS integration much easier and removing technological and process barriers to product innovation.

By mixing and matching existing services and their related resources, the centralized product and service catalog allows service providers to quickly and efficiently define and blend product offerings by re-using existing resources or sharing resource specifications across services and lines of business.

2. Dynamic order execution

Adopting and defining new and existing processes to address new offerings is becoming

increasingly important and even more challenging. With more and more offerings containing third-party elements, fulfillment is now more complicated than ever.

To make the fulfillment process efficient, you need dynamic decision points generated during the process based on eligibility and serviceability, feasibility, as well as rainy-day scenarios, or other change or provide scenarios that might appear during the process. For most service providers, supporting these kinds of changes is difficult, since processes tend to be hard-baked so that they can be automated. So long as the fulfillment process is always the same, this works fine. But when changes occur, systems are inflexible. And more often than not, changes do occur.

A better approach is to avoid a hard-coded process, and instead make definitions for processes in the catalog, which is already at the heart of the order management and fulfillment process. Processes can then be altered and updated – even while they are in flight – ensuring the best of both worlds: an automated approach that can also handle exceptions and changes as they occur. This reduces the high order fallout rate, addresses customer requirements for order changes and accelerates the order-to-cash cycle.

3. Monitoring tools

A consolidated and up-to-date view is essential for operating in a factory mode, so it is not surprising that this is one of the key areas service providers invested in, according to the survey. Business activity and monitoring is a valuable management and operational tool. On the one hand, it provides measurements and reports for management. On the other, it provides operations the means for ongoing improvements to achieve the desired efficiency without compromising on customer experience.

4. Organizational alignment

Adopting the right tools is not enough; one of the key improvements that must be implemented is the alignment of the organization to the business needs. From the survey, we see that those service providers who improved their time to market invested in organizational alignment to the new process and tools.

Conclusion? Investment Pays

The fact is that an investment in operations pays off. Investing in a service factory approach will speed up a service provider’s introduction of new services, create better end-user experiences and grow consumer profitability. These benefits will be achieved while lowering costs and increasing internal efficiencies.

Good luck improving your time to market!

Please note: this is the final blog entry of a five-part series:

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

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Companies in other global industries have undergone a process of industrialization to become more agile, efficient, productive and innovative when they became unable to compete efficiently and address growing demands. The communications, media and entertainment industry, like all other industries, needs to progress in terms of its operations and fully adopt this industrialized approach in order to speed time to market.

Car manufacturers, for example, face similar challenges to service providers in terms of trying to differentiate themselves in a very competitive and price-sensitive market. One automobile success story is the MINI Cooper – each car is built precisely according to customer specifications, based on an extensive set of configuration and customization options. Out of every 1,000,000 MINIs, only 10 will be absolutely identical!

The Mini: personalized and unique

This is made possible by combining re-usable components and flexible assembly processes into a single production line, thereby allowing the factory to manufacture virtually any number of car variants out of a finite set of parts and components.

Service providers, too, can adopt an industrialized approach to service creation and execution, building a wide range of services out of standardized components. For service providers, operations is the “factory” where products need to be put together in order to provision and fulfill them when customers place orders. A factory approach means that each product component already has standard processes for fulfillment associated with it.

When a factory approach is adopted, operations knows that for each product component there is a standard fulfillment process and system that is tested and ready-to-go. This means new products and services can be created by combining existing product components, secure in the knowledge that fulfillment systems are already in place to provision them. In this way, systems become an enabler for speedy time to market, rather than a barrier.

Standardization minimizes the complexity of the fulfillment process and its impact on underlying technology, as well as avoiding misalignment between the business and operational groups. It also reduces B/OSS integration challenges or endless changes in processes and systems for new projects.

In fact, this service factory approach creates a lean, effective, ready-to-go and automated operation, allowing customers to receive the services they want quickly, and enabling service providers to thrive and foster innovation in a competitive and dynamic environment. My next blog will provide you with the four main steps for utilizing a service factory approach.

Please note: this is part four of a five-part series:

Part one

Part two

Part three

You can also read more about it in our free eBook: What’s Stopping You From Improving Your Time To Market

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Amdocs’ 2011 survey of 125 senior executives at wireless, wireline and cable providers from every region in the world, demonstrates that service providers who invest in addressing operational challenges can improve their time to market and positively impact their bottom line: those who invested reaped results!

While the majority of service providers (67%) reported they had failed to improve their time to market, 33% reported an improvement (by 20% on average – an impressive number). When asked for the key factors enabling this improvement:

• 81% cited improved project management and control
• 76% said it was a result of improving organizational alignment
• 65% reported business and operational support systems integration

The survey shows that service providers recognize the need to address operational challenges: 70% of service providers cited the need to modernize their operational environment in order to bring products to market faster.

However, the reality is that many service providers are still being held back by a silo’ed, legacy infrastructure that denies them the speed and agility needed to ensure constant updating of the services and applications they offer to customers. And the new market dynamics are making life even more challenging. 45% of service providers reported that the increasing demand for support of third-party services, such as app stores or IPTV and additional connected devices, has increased time to market.

With new market dynamics adding more complexity and the cost of introducing new services increasing, this failure to improve time to market can no longer be ignored. So, what’s the right approach to improving time to market?

As the survey shows, there’s no single area of OSS that provides the answer by itself. Those who invested in OSS did so in several areas, such as: better project management and control (providing a consolidated view of product, services and resources); B/OSS integration; simplifying the changes to systems and processes for new products; and improving organizational alignment.

By investing in these areas, service providers reaped significant rewards as their investment enabled them to operate in an agile, efficient way, allowing them to focus on their customers’ needs without being hampered by organizational structures or legacy systems infrastructure. Like companies in other global industries, service providers have invested in a process of industrialization to become more agile, efficient, productive and innovative. Stay tuned for the next blog, which will discuss the industrialized approach that the communication, entertainment and media industry will undergo.

Please note: this is part three of a five-part series:

Part one

Part two

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Time to market is more important than ever from the perspective of service providers, but that hasn’t led to much visible improvement on the ground.

When it comes to the average time to market for introducing new products, not much has improved between 2008 and 2011. In fact, the number of service providers able to bring a product to market within six months has actually fallen; in 2008, 67% of service providers said it took six months or less to bring a new product to market, compared with 65% in 2011.

So while service providers strongly believe that quickly introducing new services has a positive impact on customer churn/loyalty, revenue generation, customer experience and brand reputation, most of the service providers we interviewed haven’t been able to meet their target.

The 2011 survey shows that as many as one in three service providers failed to achieve their target of delivering new services within six months over the last three years. The majority of service providers would like to be able to introduce new services in less than three months, but for most of them it takes between three to six months.

Indeed, there is a significant gap between the achieved time to market and what service providers actually aspire to achieve. This is especially true in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), where twice as many companies (44%) have less than three months as their target time to market compared to those who actually achieve it (21%).

But while the average time to market hasn’t changed, 50% of service providers have seen their costs of providing new services increase by 15%. This is directly linked to the complexity of service providers’ current systems.

It simply takes service providers too long to change the processes and systems for new projects, (and any change also significantly impacts existing products as well). Blame the numerous legacy systems and the hard-coded processes that surround them from past changes.

The complexity of the technology is also a time-to-market challenge. Even IP technology (which simplifies things in some respects) still includes many parameters that must be deployed and set-up when introducing a new product or service. And on top of this there’s the issue of B/OSS integration, which service providers have been facing for many years and is now more crucial than ever.

Keep watching this space for my next post, which will provide a solution to these serious problems.

Please note: this is part two of a five-part series:

Part one

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OK, so I can’t individually send all of my potential readers a postcard. But I do still remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting to receive a postcard from a friend traveling abroad three decades ago, when I was much, much younger.

Now, 30 years later, who sends postcards? But it’s not just technology that’s changed – we have, too. We want everything now and we refuse to wait. We communicate instantly, using different means, from any location. If in the past we had only one identity, today we have multiple ones: social, professional, family, etc. And each identity has different needs and consumes different services.

Consumers (me included) now demand an incessant flow of ever-new communication and entertainment services, all of which must be top quality. But are service providers actually prepared to support this market dynamic?

Three years ago, Amdocs commissioned an independent research project to carry out a detailed analysis of the challenges around time to market for products and services. We are now revisiting this topic and we have unearthed some pretty interesting findings after interviewing 125 senior executives at wireless, wireline and cable providers from every region in the world.

In 2008, 59 percent of those interviewed described time to market as “very important.” That number jumped to 70 percent in 2011.

Amdocs’ new eBook, “What’s stopping you from increasing your time to market?”, explains that the increased emphasis on time to market has been driven by customer demand for new services and the pressure on service providers to remain competitive and profitable:

• 68% of service providers in the 2011 survey cited speed of new product creation as a key business differentiator
• 95% stated that fast time to market has a positive impact on revenue
• 95% reported time to market as impacting brand image and 91% said it helps achieve customer loyalty.

Service providers who fail to improve time to market therefore risk customer churn and missed revenue opportunities. Stay tuned for further blog posts on this topic – you might even be tempted to send your friends a postcard about them!

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Hard facts about the effects of the data crunch on mobile networks are hard to come by. With this in mind, Amdocs commissioned an independent survey to establish how serious the issue is, what its effects are and what service providers are doing about it. Telesperience interviewed 30 network planners from mobile network operators across different regions with a mix of different sized operators to determine the current state of the industry. The research provides a unique picture of what the capacity crunch actually looks like in real wireless networks worldwide, as experienced by those responsible for managing its consequences.

63% of service providers interviewed said they were already experiencing the effects of the data capacity crunch. 20% of the sample confirmed that heavy traffic was leading to severe overload at times.

The root cause of this congestion varied across different regions. Asian service providers cited mobile broadband service from laptops as a primary cause, while North American respondents reported that smartphones and unlimited data plans were the most serious issue. The picture across European service providers is more varied, with smartphones, unlimited data plans and bandwidth hogs all taking a share of the blame. Overall, the rapid and continuing rise in smartphone numbers and use is generating more traffic than service providers can handle.

No cartoon Cap'ns were harmed in the writing of this blog

The major consequences of the data capacity crunch were ranked as the effect on customer experience, growing numbers of customer complaints about poor data service and the risk of churn to other networks. Conversely, voice capacity is not seen as being affected.

Many service providers believe this is starting to affect their brand reputation. In many countries with mature, developed mobile networks, there has been little to choose between providers. Customers have in the past made their choice on a wider range of factors from price plans, available mobile devices, retail locations or special offers. In some case voice coverage may vary, with localised areas of poor service becoming an overriding factor. Otherwise, relatively little time is spent considering network quality as a major factor.

The dissatisfaction in data service and its importance when used with smartphones may now become a more significant factor in the customers buying process. Service providers are right to be concerned about the serious implications to their bottom line that accompanies a poor brand reputation.

So what are service providers doing to deal with this growing problem? Perhaps unsurprisingly, most were dealing with the issue primarily by planning additional capacity. Cellsites and backhaul transmission were seen as the two major bottlenecks where capacity would have most impact. New faster radio technologies such as HSPA+ and LTE offer greater efficiencies and throughput. These cellsite upgrades will naturally require equivalent high capacity backhaul transmission to provide faster connections between cellsites and central switching centres.

Ethernet is by far the most popular choice for high capacity backhaul, with 97% of respondents having planned for it and 17% already deployed the technology.

Simply adding more equipment won’t in itself solve the problem. Around 60% perceive the greatest challenge was around end-to-end QoS (Quality of Service) design. Some 50% also thought that aligning RF and Ethernet transmission parameters would be difficult. Specifically the Ethernet backhaul connected to high capacity cellsites needs to be actively capacity managed to avoid bottlenecks or overcapacity.

In addition, with backhaul today comprising many different technologies – PDH, SDH, ATM, IP and Ethernet – design tools are required which can accurately track the capacity assignments including packet overheads throughout large and complex networks. Amdocs Mobile Data Capacity Solution addresses these needs and allows network designers to stay in control as they migrate to new technologies.

In the survey, service providers recognised that the most important factor to their bottom line was aligning network costs with revenues. Industry analysts suggest that many service providers continue to make around 70% of their revenues from voice today, but some 70% of traffic being carried is data rather than voice.

Other strategies to deal with capacity growth are also in hand. Unlimited data plans have been withdrawn recently by several large network providers that have cited abuse by bandwidth hogs as a primary reason. Usage caps restrict this abuse and free up resources to share among other paying customers.

Traffic shaping, using some form of policy management system, has also been a popular theme of recent mobile conferences, with most service providers either having deployed policy management solutions or in the process of acquiring one. The pace of adoption has been driven in Europe by regulatory requirements to avoid bill shock.

Optimisation of data traffic can also relieve capacity. For example, there is no need to download high resolution video suitable for large screens when operating a small screen device. Inline transcoding of such video traffic can substantially reduce the data download required. Efficient design of mobile data applications can also significantly affect overall traffic demand.

Traffic offload to public (and private) Wi-Fi networks or femtocells is also a significant strategy. Both ATT Wireless and Verizon are reported to be offloading some 50% of video traffic to public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The survey provides concrete evidence that the data capacity crunch is affecting mobile service providers worldwide. Brand reputation, customer complaints and churn are starting to be impacted. While service providers are choosing to expand capacity by adopting newer technologies, network planners also recognise growing difficulties of capacity management and configuration for Ethernet and high speed cellsites. These will require sophisticated engineering design and planning tools. Additionally, a range of complementary strategies is essential to address rapidly growing data traffic levels.

A data sheet detailing the findings of this research is available to download at  www.osstransformation.com

Also available for download is our whitepaper “10 Ways to deal with the Data Capacity Crunch“

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