Amdocs, a provider of customer experience systems, has announced it has delivered another major enhancement to its Amdocs CES Portfolio: the industry's first single catalog offering to support both business and operational systems (BSS/OSS).
Using a common data model, service providers can now deploy a customer-facing product catalog for BSS and a network-facing service catalog for OSS. With two catalogs residing on a common data foundation, service fulfillment becomes easier to automate, and pre-configured services can be easily reused and recombined for faster time-to-market for new offerings. The announcement was made at Management World 2009 taking place in Nice.
This integrated yet modular model provides a dual benefit: two integrated catalogs developed for the specific needs of two sets of users, combined with the benefits of a single common data model. Empowered by the industry-leading Amdocs Enterprise Product Catalog offering, the common data model ensures consistency between customer-facing and resource-facing specifications.
To support a catalog-driven approach to order fulfillment, Amdocs has introduced a new OSS product called Service Composition Manager. Service Composition Manager can reduce costs and time-to-market for new offerings by enabling the re-use of existing service and network elements when creating and fulfilling new services. This is achieved through a three-phase and automatic assessment model which extends service de-composition to include checks against the service catalog and also factors in customer data, such as which services the customer already has, and network feasibility.
"Service fulfillment is becoming more and more a challenge with the boom of new services and the constant pressure to reduce both the time and the cost involved," said Arindam Banerjee, Vice President, Enabling Technologies, Yankee Group. "If service providers want to ensure efficient and accurate fulfillment, the commercial products that are launched and their underlying network resources that support them need to have something in common. The latest enhancement of the Amdocs Enterprise Product Catalog is a very significant announcement for the communications industry as it delivers a comprehensive end-to-end single catalog model that can address these challenges by effectively connecting disparate BSS and OSS systems."
Adopted by several industry leaders, the Amdocs Enterprise Product Catalog conforms to industry standards such as the TM Forum Shared Information/Data (SID) model and can be deployed in Amdocs-based systems environments as well as in third-party systems environments.