By
Chun-Ling Woon
Service Providers, who have to continuously stay ahead of the competition by introducing new Product Offerings to the market, have been turning to Product Catalogs and Service Catalogs to fulfill their rapid time-to-market requirements. By and large, this has been via either internally developed catalogs, or via extensions of ISV offerings. ISV CRM and Billing vendors have stretched their Product Catalogs to perform the role of a Service Catalog, while Service Catalog providers have moved into the Product Catalog space. These catalogs, with a bias introduced by their roots, are typically poorly suited to the combined task at hand.
Where disparate catalogs are employed, each with a focus on their own domains, seamless integration has not been achieved, resulting in both longer times to market, and in disconnects between what is sold and what can be fulfilled. A cohesive, centralized Product/Service Catalog approach is crucial in closing both of these gaps.
Is there a gap?
Why do we need to bridge the gap?
Product catalogs contain the specification of the Product Offerings sold to the customers. Product catalogs must be able to offer multi-bundle offerings to diverse geographical sites using complex discounts, availability checks, contracts, service-level agreements, promotions, tax rates. They must also manage product content such as images, terms and conditions, specification sheets and product collateral.
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A cohesive, centralized Product / Service Catalog approach is crucial in closing both of these gaps. |
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vagaries of imaginative pricing plans and promotions. Traditionally, these characteristics have led most organizations and software vendors to non-catalog based implementations, ranging from hard-coded to simple table-based look-ups. As the number of means of fulfilling the same service has increased, and the frequency / complexity of delivering Services over shared components has increased, the benefits of a Catalog based approach have become apparent.
A consolidated approach
Having independent product and service catalog offerings fails to meet the operational needs of Communication Service Providers
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Service Catalogs contain specifications that define parameters and features of a service, such as bandwidth and speed. The service catalog describes product features in technical terms whereas the product catalog is the opposite. Service Catalogs focus on how the Product Offering is fulfilled, they are relatively more static in nature, less visual and content oriented, and are not burdened with the
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(CSP). For example, let’s examine the introduction of a higher bandwidth internet service offering. Ideally, the new product offerings should be able to be defined in one place, with the new Customer Facing Service (CFS) automatically exposed both upstream, to the customer via the product catalog, and downstream, to the service catalog, Network
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