Netcracker sweet on NGN potential
Mobile operators are focusing on a limited number of key strategic partners as they transform their network and operational infrastructures, meaning there will only be a few winners in each market, according to ex-Yankee Group analyst Sanjay Mewada.
Mewada, who is now vice president of strategy of strategy at OSS vendor Netcracker, said that instead of dealing with a clutch of vendors to develop point solutions for each area of activity, operators are now looking to deal with just a handful of trusted strategic partners.
“Carriers are now making big bets with vendors,” Mewada said, “and in the areas of fulfilment, assurance, CRM, networks and systems integration they are moving to a few strategic partners on their transformation projects.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mewada claimed that this has been good news for Netcracker – with (he said) the company winning nine of the biggest ten contracts awarded in fulfillment this year.
But Mewada also said that there will increasingly be an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between the service fulfillment area (in which Netcracker works) and service assurance, in which he currently thinks Vallent has the best play in mobile, with perhaps IBM-Micromuse the heaviest hitter from the fixed side. In the billing side, he named Amdocs and fancied Oracle in the CRM side.
Although Amdocs has added inventory specialist Cramer to its capability, Medawa said that he still viewed Amdocs as a billing company, rather than a big competitor in the service layer.
“They’re a $2 billion billing company,” he said, “but only an $80 million OSS company.”
As for Telcordia, which has been making a great deal of itself as a fulfilment expert for next gen services, Medawa said the company had great strength in TDM- “that’s their pedigree” – but asserted that his greatest competition is operators’ internal IT.
Medawa said that operators have been concentrating on the next generation of their network layers, and of their customer layer (the billing and CRM piece) but they have not yet been making similar investment sin the service layer, which sits between the two.
But operators need to create a unified service layer if they are to reap the true benefits of NGNs, Medawa said, because its only by having that service infrastructure that operators can differentiate.
“We see IMS/ SDP sitting between the network and service layers as a hybrid, and as a validation of our emphasis of where that differentiation will be created,” he said. “After investment in CRM and networks, we’ve got to the point where investment in OSS is critical. You’re now seeing that all the major operators all have OSS transformation projects in hand.”
The momentum for that has come from the need for operators to reduce integration and failure costs, Medawa said, as they seek to open up their service creaion and delivery capabilities. Accordingly they have put pressure on the market to deliver interoperable and open standards, which would ultimately enable them to create unified service infrastructures, Medawa said.