A fragmented OSS/BSS marketplace is doing no one a favour, argues Christian Fredriksson, Head of Operations and Business Software Business Unit, Nokia Siemens Networks.
Service providers of all kind are currently finding themselves at a crossroad. On the one hand they lack a comprehensive view of how many services a customer has purchased, never mind how they are being consumed, but at the same time they are under huge pressure to introduce a myriad of new services quickly.
On the other hand, they have hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of OSS management applications and business support systems (BSS) that are not only interacting between themselves, but with the network devices – base stations, wireless switches, routers, broadband modems – everything that is needed to connect a network to a user.
This has resulted in their networks evolving into highly complex islands of infrastructure from multiple vendors, each with its own management system. There are just too many disparate systems involved, which restricts service providers’ ability to create, deploy, provision, monitor, control, troubleshoot and bill services effectively and quickly enough to stay ahead in today’s intensely competitive markets – many of which require real-time mediation.
As more technologies are introduced and as service providers move to triple and quad plays to compete, the cost of customizing and maintaining these interfaces has become unsustainable and so has their management – for operators and application developers alike. It doesn’t take much to picture the consequences for service providers of wrongly budgeting the costs to automate each interface within the OSS.
The only way that service providers can offer customer services to support the new blend of telecoms and media services economically is by facilitating customer self-care, but again their infrastructure and systems prevents them from saving money and improving customer service in this way.
Given this situation, at first glance it is strange that customer relationship management (CRM) and order management systems saw a strong increase in sales in 20061), while billing, revenue assurance and mediation system sales fell significantly in most parts of the world – the front-end is no good without the engine. At the same time, spending in the global OSS network and service management market has become fragmented.
The reason that operators are stopping short of tackling the complexities of billing, revenue assurance and mediation is that, as history has shown, it is far easier to topple a regime than it is to replace it with a better system. Service providers understand both their plight and the trends that are driving the market only too well. The question is what to do about it – the solution has to be economically viable, cannot disrupt service provision and must provide a stable, but flexible way to move forward. Also, every operator is at a different stage with different business priorities, but a bespoke solution is out of the question because of cost and the fact that I would simply perpetuate the situation.
The larger vendors started working on this knotty problem a couple of years ago and concluded that the only viable solution was a common management platform, based on open standards, that is vendor-neutral and technology-agnostic.
This move towards commonality is reflected by the growing consolidation and collaboration among vendors, illustrated by recently announced, long-term agreement between the newly formed Nokia Siemens Networks and Cisco and their individual and collective agreements with other big players, such as IBM and Amdocs.
The plan is to provide a common end-to-end network view of diverse network elements – across IP and mobile technologies – that are automatically discovered and represented as a virtual network model. Likewise, the solution will provide a complete view of network resources regardless of platforms, technologies or vendors. The platform will include basic fault, configuration, performance and security (FCAPS) management functionality as well as common functions, such as data acquisition and network element mediation, which will be utilized by higher-level OSS applications.
Nokia Siemens Networks’ Open EMS Suite provides capabilities of an element management system (EMS) and can be used to build EMS for various kinds of networks including transport, mobile, and broadband will be harnessed alongside the Cisco Active Network Abstraction (ANA) management solution.
George Nazi, vice president of Global Engineering, BT, says, "While often downplayed, the OSS is the critical engine for our ability to support our network investment in meeting the demands of consumers and business for new services, new technologies and new ways of doing business. Providing a common view of the physical and virtual network across all technologies and building a foundation for other vendors will complement BT’s software driven network strategy to deliver superior customer experiences."
So exactly how will the common management platform help? Consider a fault management application. It monitors everything for a video-on-demand service say, end-to-end between someone’s home and the server. It touches hundreds of devices en route and gathers information from each of them. Hundreds of other applications touching those devices, look for the same information. Instead of all that duplicated effort and high level of integration, it makes sense to have a single source of information for whichever devices need that information at any particular time.
In other words, the fault management isn’t service specific, but fault-specific, allowing the network to be performance-centric. Not only can does it become aware that there is a problem with the video signal reaching someone’s home, it can also reroute the signal, instead of just reporting it and all without thousands of unnecessary communications between devices.
The collaboration will also provide a basis for helping OSS and other software vendors produce or extend their own applications more quickly. A number of industry players are supporting the move and will be leveraging the common technology from Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks to extend their own OSS solutions that assist with issues such as fault management, network provisioning and inventory control.
Arguably, the biggest challenge and, simultaneously, the most important aspect of this approach is that is masks complexity, leaving service providers with an ostensibly simpler, more flexible and dynamic infrastructure as they move towards next generation networks and beyond that migrating towards an IP Multimedia Subsystem environment. From now on, service providers and vendors should focus on how they can best bend and meld infrastructure to meet existing and future business needs rather than about customization and quick fixes that turn out to be anything but.