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By Ed Finegold
The telecom industry has suffered significantly less than other notable sectors in the declining economy, but service providers and their IT shops are feeling the pressure. Even where revenue hasn’t fallen off, there’s a feeling that now is a good time to throttle budgets back. Many CSPs, though, are in the midst of multi-year transformation programs. They’ve rolled out new technologies and services and are trying to simplify operations infrastructure and achieve customer-centricity. While capital expenditures may retreat, and some CSPs will always make the short-sighted mistake of freezing all development activity, transformational goals like efficiency, customer-centricity, and operational simplification may be more important in the current environment. There is an upside here for BSS suppliers, both within and outside of traditional telecom markets. Discussions with those in-the-know reveal pockets of opportunity for the BSS space in this tightening market.
Consulting the Oracle
One of the little secrets most analysts and journalists don’t like to admit is that we’re not always the most informed people in the industry. We have the luxury of collecting information from many sources and synthesizing an educated and informed viewpoint. If we’re good at our jobs, we know where to go for reliable information, we understand that information, and we deliver it ways that make sense to our audiences. The folks who really know what’s happening on the ground, however, are those who walk halls every day, talking to budget owners, reading RFPs, and trying to keep their offerings aligned with service providers’ changing priorities. Brian Pawlus, Director of Product Marketing for Oracle Communications, is one of these people.
Readers might wonder what a marketing guy knows about CSPs priorities. Don’t let the title fool you. Pawlus talks to Oracle’s prospects and customers. He interacts with its sales teams. It’s his job to know what’s happening in CSP’s inner sanctums as Oracle battles heavyweights like Amdocs, Comverse, and Convergys for leadership in the BSS space. What’s more, in almost every business in which it is engaged, Oracle is accustomed to being the biggest dog. In the BSS space, Oracle is a relatively big dog, but not by any means the biggest. What keeps someone like Pawlus up at night is trying to find ways to make Oracle as dominant a player in this space as it is in nearly every other. That requires accurate, first hand market knowledge.
So when a press release crosses my desk touting Oracle’s recent benchmark that demonstrates its Billing and Revenue Management platform’s ability to support 100 million subscribers, I ask Brian, “Why would anyone care?” A story on benchmarking is
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Some CSPs will always make the short-sighted mistake of freezing all development activity. |
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likely to put readers into a stupor quicker than an after-lunch seminar on real estate law, but the back story is where the action is found.
“People are trying to do more with less,” Pawlus says. “The two biggest drivers we see are that companies want to drive costs down. They have infrastructures with many billing and CRM systems…I’ve seen carriers with 35 operating companies and they want to get to one set of processes, if not one set of systems,” Pawlus said.
In other words, winning in this environment means being the last BSS supplier standing. Your platform needs to be the one to which everything else is migrated. If you can’t prove your scalability, you’re too risky and you won’t win. But will we actually see CSPs move all of their subscribers to one billing system?
“I don’t think that’s the plan, because you need to think about points of failure and other costs, but it is possible. We’ve talked to CSPs in India who say they might put 100 million on one system, or break it out to 30 to 40 million in various nodes, which is still a big number.”
This brings us back to Oracle’s position in the market. Unlike some of its key competitors, it’s no secret that Oracle doesn’t yet have that one, massive reference installation with 50 or 60 million customers running from one platform. Does it run 20 or 30 million? Sure. Could it tackle an installation with 100 million subs? The benchmark is meant to demonstrate that its BSS technology can. Few would question its databases or Oracle’s ability, as a corporation, to support massive CSPs.
But getting to the top of the mountain means being the cornerstone in the world’s largest IT shops. While Oracle’s databases are already there, its billing and revenue
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