OSS Meets the Challenges to Expansion
Since carriers are trying to meet a key goal of rapid introduction and delivery of new services as they expand globally, OSS solutions are in demand. According to Michael Kearns, vendors are “...seeing
significant demand for automated service ordering & fulfillment solutions driven mainly by carriers
wanting to extend their service offerings to deliver a diverse range of network and cloud services
to customers and partners that transit not just their network and data centers, but also other carrier
networks and data centers. The key to success for such systems is true service and network abstraction
that is independent of vendors, carrier, and service type.”
Additionally, CSPs can, and should, leverage their OSSs to move from a reactive organizational
model to a proactive one, says Jeff Parker, CEO, Monolith Software. “One of the biggest challenges
will be instrumenting the infrastructure to be monitored for KPI’s and metrics,” Parker told
Pipeline. “Historically, operations teams have been very fault driven and fault focused. That is reactive.
The bad thing already happened. The customer has already had a bad experience. CSP’s need to
migrate from a fault focused world to a metric based, SLA/KPI driven world. CSP’s need to spot
problematic trends and degradations before customers experience a problem. This is why there is so
much focus on CEM at this time.”
And no expansion effort is effective without proper planning and research; another OSS function.
“Capacity planning and analytics are key for expansion efforts so that operators can decide the RoI and
instruct their sales/marketing effectively on where and how to expand.” points out Anand Venkat.
Marie Fiala Timlin identified some additional areas where OSS can meet the challenge: “It is crucial
to have network management policies that are consistent throughout their network, even across
access networks (e.g. operators offering both cable & WiFi), and policy control components that can
interoperate with other vendor network elements. Especially for usage-based billing, the requirement
is to have credible accurate usage data throughout the network--no carrier wants to be in the headline
news due to inaccurate over-billing incidents.”
The Future is Bright
As we've seen, the overwhelming consensus is that communications networks will continue to expand
globally at a very rapid rate, and recent research from Cisco, Infonetics, and even the FCC sings
in unison. This much is certain. Whether or not carriers will keep pace with demand and customer
satisfaction and continue to enjoy substantial year-over-year profits remains to be seen, as OSS
solutions are critical in this evolution.
From his perspective, Amartus CEO Michael Kearns believes, “Mergers and acquisitions will continue
as a means to expand networks and grow market share, however the emergence of interconnect and
wholesale service offering, as well as local loop unbundling, means that carriers now have greater
choice when it comes to delivering global services and compete on a level playing field.”
