|
|
But could the reticence among some service providers to take those proactive steps towards the future cause vendors to go over the heads of their CSP customers? “Some B/OSS developers appear to operating under the impression that many carriers aren’t in tune or are choosing to put their heads in the sand when it comes to the critical trends shaping the way businesses want to communicate,” said Craig Clausen, Executive Vice President of New Paradigm Resources Group (NPRG). So what’s a vendor to do?
“Vendors we’ve spoken with seem to be increasingly looking beyond their service provider customers and towards the SPs’ business customers for further direction on what back office systems they need to be developing for SPs,” said Clausen. “Therefore, one critical trend driving innovation among B/OSS vendors is the shifting communications requirements of businesses – both large- and mid-size.”
So, with the benefit of standards, a new sense of purpose brought about by competitive threat, and a more holistic approach to understanding shifting business requirements, what specific technologies and market segments demonstrate innovative thinking?
|
|
“I believe that what's driving innovation for service providers and the vendors that support them is fear.” |
|
doesn’t sport the price tag of the
solutions that the RBOCs and massive
MSOs have. So perhaps there is OSS/
BSS innovationin those clouds.
Also, Clausen sees that among developers, including the OSS/BSS set, “ that ‘Business Intelligence’ is more than a buzzword and can have a meaningful impact on their businesses – especially Tier 2 carriers who are turning out to be the waking giants. As these carriers simultaneous push forward and feel competitive pain, they’re forced to examine fundamental business practices.” Whereas inefficiencies could be abided in previous years, the changing landscape eliminates that luxury. “The cozy world free of meaningful competition allowed these providers to overlook the value of having integrated back office systems that facilitate the sharing of data and information across organizational boundaries,” said Clausen. “Today, these carriers can’t overlook this any longer if they hope to be successful participants in tomorrow’s markets.”
|
|
|
|
|
Growth Areas
One area, according to Mortensen, is order management and product catalog. “The explosion of new services, supported by the services layer (based on Service Delivery Platforms) outstripped the ability of the OSS and BSS systems to support them.” Changes in services were being made in weeks while OSS/BSS systems took months to schedule resources, change catalogs, test systems, etc., Mortensen said. However, vendors have found their way out of this time trap through advances in product catalogs. “These can be modified quickly to support the new services. All the major vendors have such systems as well as specialized vendors in the order management and product catalog spaces.”
In addition, a whole lot of smart money
is still riding on the growth of cloud
services. “There are new benefits
available from the much lower costs of
virtualized computing environments,”
said Lancaster. “This applies to CSPs
who run their own in-house OSS/BSS
environments as well as those who
look to the Cloud Services providers.
This may be a good example of
technology innovation, but not really
OSS/BSS innovation.” However, there is
a great deal of innovation going on in
the way that OSS/BSS providers are
leveraging the cloud for their own
solutions. Hosted services, especially in
the billing space, are a definite growth
area, and seem to be a solid solution
for small- and medium-sized carriers
who want an agile billing model that
|
|
And tomorrow’s markets may mean a different role for those carriers, according to Ruzicka. “Competition is more real now with global businesses challenging the industry and doing their best to relegate service providers to utility-status.” In addition, she asserted that as networks crossed the threshold from technology upgrade to critical infrastructure, innovation was both enabled and stifled. It creates a great environment for innovation on the part of app developers, device manufacturers, OTT plays, and the rest. However, carriers are paying for helping to create an environment wherein “products and services assume network connectivity and there is no differentiation among those that provide it,” said Ruzicka. “So continuing to compete on connectivity is the fast track to utility status - highly regulated companies that provide equal access.”
However, that isn’t the only conceivable fate for carriers, according to Ruzicka. “There are products like mobile banking and M2M that service providers are ideally suited to deliver given their status as trusted, secure, stable operators.” Leveraging their stability and reliability, though, will take some major shifts, both in technology and corporate culture. However, most of the analysts I spoke to seem confident that OSS/BSS vendors are hot on the trail of the sorts of support technologies that could enable these big market shifts. Ruzicka insists that if these changes are going to be made, now’s the time. “It's time to compete and innovate around services - really compete and innovate - not just plod along like a utility.”
|
|
|
