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The Evolving World of BSS and OSS
© Internet Telephony -
January 2008 - Richard Grigonis
Highdeal is a global provider of pricing and rating solutions (180 implementations in 50+ countries). They’ve successfully tackled the billing problem in a multiservice world by delivering unconstrained pricing and packaging flexibility coupled with real-time transaction management. The Yankee Group has named Highdeal the fastest growing billing and rating vendor defined in terms of announced service provider customers.
David McNierney, Highdeal’s Vice President of Market Development, says, “IMS is very exciting for service providers in terms of BSS and OSS. But it’s a pretty daunting task to change your back office infrastructure to address a new set of priorities. IMS involves a change in the network allowing any service to be delivered to any device anywhere at any point in time. The real challenges that IMS introduces concern marketing and how a provider can make money from it. This is something that traditional BSS and OSS systems have not been engineered to support. Part of the problem is that many products in the BSS and OSS area, particularly third-party products, were built around the considerations of the legacy services of the PSTN, cable TV and so forth. These had proven traffic volumes and revenue streams. It was more of an operational challenge in the old days, which is to say, you were concerned with things such as getting invoices out the door, responding to customer complaints and inquiries, doing the truck roll and turning up services.”
“But now IMS changes the game quite a bit,” says McNierney. “It forces service providers to think about how the back office infrastructure should be changed to support the new types of services enabled by IMS. How do they get from ‘here’ to ‘there’? Virtually all service providers looking at IMS are incumbents with extensive existing infrastructure built with millions of dollars of investment over the years. Do you just start with a clean slate and create a parallel BSS and OSS environment for next-gen and IMS services? Or do you try to create a sort of hybrid, delineating a migration path from the legacy infrastructure, and focusing your dollars on the high priority pain points that the new networks cause?”
“Very often the core capabilities of the BSS and OSS systems are just as applicable in IMS as they were in the old world,” says McNierney, “things such as generating an invoice and responding to customer inquiries. A real challenge, however, are some of the new business functions that must be supported in, for example, the IMS architecture. These are things such as marketing, implementing new business models, figuring out how to monetize content-based services, handling mash-ups, and dealing with the whole Telco 2.0 discussion, and finally settling with various third parties, be they application providers, content providers, or other wholesale applications and services.”
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