Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 7

	This Month's Issue:
	Product Lifecycle Management

Bringing New NGN Services "To Life"
by Leveraging PLM Systems

By Yogen Patel

Driven by the pressure to increase market share, boost subscriber revenues, stave off competition, and reduce churn, communications service providers are being challenged to deliver a richer mix of products and packages that include voice, video, Internet, wireless, content, entertainment, and other multi-media application services. Operators are actively attempting to deliver differentiated and dynamic product offerings that are constructed from many reusable underlying components, have several variations, are introduced faster, and retired more quickly.

In order to rapidly deliver a wide variation of new products and services, operators will need to transform their network infrastructures and their product realization processes. For many service providers, launching a new complex product takes, on average, twelve months, and, in some cases, this can be eighteen months or more. Lifecycles must be transformed from months to weeks, and service providers need to develop the core capabilities to launch, customize, and take down services in an efficient and speedy manner.

To partly address this challenge, operators worldwide are making investments in IP transformation and Next Generation Network (NGN) architectures. These infrastructures enable more flexible creation, management, and control of complex NGN-powered multimedia services, which will ultimately provide operators with crucial new revenue streams. In a legacy environment of single-purpose networks, each parallel network is essentially "the product." In contrast, the advent of NGN architectures is eliminating the need to install service-specific networks. The software-centric and application-driven nature of NGN infrastructures provides significant flexibility in terms of service creation and service delivery.

However, the improved flexibility brings with it a new set of challenges related to packaging services into more complex offerings and managing end-to-end product information. Furthermore, different types of product delivery activities will need to be managed and orchestrated now, ones that involve a variety of systems (SDPs, third party applications, BSS/OSS) and stakeholders (internal development, trusted and un-trusted service providers, systems integrators, and outsourced partners).

As NGN implementations accelerate, network enablement will become a much smaller piece of the New Product Introduction (NPI) cycle time. Operators will need to address the following NPI bottleneck issues: systematic definition of sellable product offerings composed of various NGN services,

Lifecycles must be transformed from months to weeks, and service providers need to develop the core capabilities to launch, customize, and take down services in an efficient and speedy manner.

dissemination of product data across business and operations support systems (BSS/OSS), and configuring operational systems to begin taking and fulfilling orders. These are not necessarily new challenges for operators, but the relative cost and impact of these issues will be dramatically accentuated in a more dynamic NGN environment. Realizing the full potential of NGN to achieve shorter launch cycles and efficient service delivery will require operators to directly and more systematically manage the end-to-end processes for service and product creation.

Product and marketing managers currently use ad-hoc tools and approaches to define marketplace offers and manage product portfolios and utilize manually intensive approaches for updating product data in BSS/OSS applications. These approaches will rapidly break down in an environment where there will be a one hundred-fold increase in the service, content, and application capabilities enabled in the network (directly by operators or through partner providers). The return on investment from NGN infrastructures will be considerably weakened if operators do not address how to quickly package these new capabilities into sellable offerings, and speedily and efficiently enable the various operational systems to support ordering, fulfillment, and billing. As part of implementing a NGN, operators need to simultaneously address the problem of how to rapidly package new service capabilities into market-ready product offerings, and how to systematically enable operational systems to reference and utilize these offering definitions. This cannot be an afterthought.

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