Back-Office Systems Move to the Front Burner
© Broadband Properties -
December 2007 - David McNierney
It's not your mother's BSS/OSS anymore...Ma Bell's that is. Here's what to look for and how to choose among many options.
The back-office and business systems required of today's broadband properties bear little resemblance to the systems that grew out of the traditional telecommunications industry. Those systems were built for very different challenges in a very different market environment.
Back-office systems lagged behind the development of the telecommunications industry. While telecom deregulation and the Internet boom of the 90s brought us competitetive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and application service providers (ASPs) and made telecom a white hot industry, the systems designed to support those new business models changed very little from their predecessors, which had been originally designed and built by BellCore decades earlier.
But now, in the aftermath of the Internet boom and the convergence of services over IP, providers of all kinds are taking a more practical approach to their business support and operations support systems (BSS/OSS). Without the comfort of guaranteed margins from the "regulated monopoly" era or the wide-eyed expectations of the CLEC generation, providers have become more aware of the challenges involved in profitably delivering a robust sutie of triple play services to customers.
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