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- Pre-integrated, productized solutions are also superior in that they reduce complexity and integration time, leading to quick market entry and first-mover advantage, as well as reduced cost of ownership as the learning curve and development expense are amortized over multiple implementations.
What is a successful partnership?
To illustrate the attributes of a successful partnership, consider the case of next-generation billing and provisioning systems, where partners are required for:
- Access management equipment – DSL, cable, satellite, wireless…
- SLA and QoS – bandwidth and traffic management, monitoring, security
- VoIP – softswitches, taxes, emergency routing, and number management
- Content and messaging
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Partnering is not piggybacking. Successful partnerships can take years to develop. |
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one and communicate the partnership’s obvious benefits to potential customers.
This approach to partnerships has been extremely beneficial for many companies. The following example is presented to illustrate how OSS/BSS vendors can benefit from partnerships with third party equipment such as Broadband Access, to roll-out large scale off-the-shelf broadband solutions rapidly and at the fraction of the cost of deploying them from scratch.
OSS and access: a winning team
As the focal point for sign-up, provisioning, resource and end-user management, the Operations Support Systems (OSS) needs to be aware of and integrated to many parts of the network and especially to the access equipment to better monitor and manage
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To be successful in this area, software vendors have to partner with equipment vendors whose business is often very different: different technology focus, different development cycles and support operations, different sales cycles, different sales and marketing strategies, etc. Buying such a partner would require adapting to activities you have little or no experience in, potentially slowing you down dramatically if each company’s business or internal culture clashes. A partnership is clearly a better situation in this case.
Partnering is not piggybacking. Successful partnerships can take years to develop. However, if it’s a true win-win situation, both parties can see their interest and should be diligent in setting up the foundation for success, that is: sales relationships for sales leads exchange, technical team relationship for off-the-shelf integration and easier product support and maintenance, as well as marketing relationship to speak together as
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customer access and resource utilization. One of the successful partnerships an OSS vendor can set up therefore is with access equipment vendors, whether in DSL, cable, satellite or wireless space. We are presently experiencing a surge in wireless deployment, so we’ll use this as an example of the benefits achieved by integrating OSS/BSS to WiMAX access. The example translates easily to other access scenarios, and to partnerships in general.
New broadband wireless and WiMAX technologies promise significant opportunities to offer new services and compete with incumbent broadband providers. However, in order to effectively roll-out data and voice services on their networks, wireless operators must implement customer management and back-office solutions that are cost-efficient and integrated with their networks. By its nature WiMAX, and especially mobile WiMAX, offers benefits in the area of self-installation
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