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By
Fareed Khan
The ability to assemble service components like presence/location, integration, and media control is crucial if operators are to enable service “mashups” that innovate, entertain and empower customers. Offering such services is a necessity if operators are to stave off disintermediation by OTT players and improve thinning margins in core services.
Exposing BSS
Much of the effort around mashups has focused on what operators should do to expose networks to 3rd party developers. But more can be done to expose capabilities from operators’ BSS environments that enhance customer-experience. The evolution of Web Services and gateways like ParlayX, SIP and standard interfaces will foster better communication among BSS functions, like order management, product catalogs, billing, and charging, and IP, PSTN, mobile and cable networks.
For example, today, order management
systems orchestrate orders as they
come in from front-end systems and
travel to activation, billing, inventory
and charging.
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Integration will be critical to the communication between SDP and BSS. |
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which services could be created and
orchestrated and where the complexity
of service stove-pipes could be
abstracted. Today, however, there is an
opportunity for SDPs to provide
aggregation layers through which
operators’ sophisticated BSS
capabilities are exposed to 3rd parties.
3rd parties would in turn pay for the
opportunity to leverage operators’
dynamic catalogs, and ordering,
provisioning, billing, charging,
payments and customer care systems.
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There is an opportunity
for monetization here. Everything is
managed through a secure order
process with carefully designed
workflows that can be updated at any
time. As a result, all orchestration and
SDP-related order decomposition can
be handled as part of the order
process. This can be valuable to
partners or MVNOs that want to view
SDP services, via a catalog, and place
orders for services leveraging the
operator’s infrastructure. Potentially,
the service could be billed and
activated by operators’ order
management systems as part of their
wholesale bundles or offerings.
Integration will be critical to the
communication between SDP and BSS.
A few years ago SDPs were hyped as
“horizontal” or “common” layers across
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The potential for monetization goes further, as more non-traditional players, such as banks and utilities, look for ways to extend their services into the telecom industry. To accommodate these and other potential partners or customers, operators must abandon any silo pattern of doing business in favor of a more integrated approach. They need to focus on opening up a path of least resistance to 3rd parties seeking partners experienced with not only networks and BSS, but also partnership management, settlement, and SLA management—all increasingly important in next-gen services. If operators can consolidate service access points and stop the practice of managing multiple silos and solutions for every service, they can become coveted as key “enablers” to 3rd parties and consumers alike.
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