Seth Nesbitt, vp marketing of Amdocs’ OSS division, has said that OSS/ BSS transformation projects will be helped greatly by the Amdocs 7 product suite, but that the company will still need to partner where it sees the need in specific areas.
Amdocs is position Amdocs 7 as the only industry specific software suite. Other OSS and CRM/Billing products are either point products or general products designed for several industries, Nesbitt said. And the suite offers a service solution from the network to the customer, he claimed.
“Service providers don’t have to stitch this together any more. It’s been great business for systems integrators up to now to do so, but it’s not an efficient way to manage customer interactions,” he said.
Nesbitt said that the industry has seen an OSS gap between the customer and the network, and Amdocs, with its billing and CRM expertise, has bridged that with its Cramer acquisition to give a complete network view, and offer a roadmap for NGOSS transformation.
“The most commonly quoted goal for network transformation projects is reduced time to market for new services and products – especially in OSS where there have been fragmented legacy systems, siloed systems per service which are real barriers to the market.
We reported yesterday how Telcordia, with its service management suite is attempting to stitch together NGOSS from a fulfilment/ service assurance point of view. Amdocs is approaching this from a CRM/ billing standpoint, adding inventory and content management skills in Cramer and QPass. With IBM and Oracle also acquisitive in this area, they are pretty much all claiming to offer end to end OSS/ BSS solutions, whilst portraying the opposition as lacking on one regard or another. The truth, as ever, may lie somewhere in the middle.
Nesbitt acknowledges that, and points to Amdocs’ partnership with IBM (which with its Micromuse and Vallent acquisitions is now strong in service assurance) as evidence that this is an ecosystem in which companies will need to partner to give them different areas of speciality.