Comptel Corporation, the vendor of Operations Support System (OSS) software, has today revealed the results of independent research into managing telecoms product complexity. The independent research, undertaken on behalf of Comptel by Analysys Research, has highlighted the fact that operators across the globe are struggling to manage increased complexity in telecoms products. 84 per cent of operators interviewed agreed that product management was a major challenge and most said that their existing OSS/BSS systems were inadequate in dealing with it.
Operators need to provide a wide portfolio of services, packaged in a variety of ways, in order to meet their customers' increasingly sophisticated needs and remain competitive. Yet managing the complexities associated with these services and packages is causing a major head-ache for operators. Virtually every service offering requires some action to take place in the network or in a software layer, and when services are combined into packages, the number of actions increases dramatically. Tom Harden, analyst at Analysys Research, commented: "There is demand from operators for solutions to help link customer-facing commercial views of products with technical network views of component services. Most of the operators we spoke to were facing challenges in managing increasingly complex products."
The research, which polled over 20 global operators in both the fixed-line and mobile sectors, showed that operators were aware of the need to update their product management solutions to take account of aggressive product roadmaps, increased costs and inadequacies in other core systems – most notably billing. In addition 79 per cent of the operators questioned in the survey mentioned that they see the value of implementing a centralised catalog solution to support their daily operations or as a key element in their future IT architecture.
Jukka Nyman, director of business intelligence and strategy at Comptel, said: "The results of the research were surprising in that there was very little regional variety in the responses. Operators in Europe and Asia Pacific were both very similar in their understanding of the challenges surrounding product management, with only the Middle East showing a slightly lower appreciation of these. It was also clear that most operators, whether fixed or mobile, have a very poor understanding of the role Service Catalog solutions, such as Comptel's, can play in helping to manage this complexity."