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Levine believes the catalog should reside not in the SDP, but in BSS for the purpose of faster provisioning. “As telecommunications architectures converge around IP and IT standards, the SDP’s integration with BSS will become all the more important to flow-through provisioning and the creation and provisioning of services that have to populate growing catalogs.”
Levine also notes that the IBM, HP, and Accenture increasingly talk of hooking SDP into BSS. Additionally, most BSS vendors have created some form of end-user communication or some form of exposure of capabilities in BSS using their SDPs. The point is that operators want to expose functionality on the one side to users and on the other to partners developing mobile broadband applications. They can, for example, expose messaging capabilities so that SMS or MMS can become part of an OTT app to help people see the status of their accounts or to modify or make changes to their services.
Exposing Real-Time Billing and Charging
As operators accomplish more with variable billing and charging, and real-time orchestration and charging for applications, SDPs will play a bigger role in bringing real-time capabilities to market and fostering closer ties between customers and BSS capabilities. With app stores, IMS and LTE, it will become increasingly important for operators to organize their assets via a master catalog, and provision access to the assets using their ordering systems.
Those catalogs will answer to customers’ demands, which include more premium and value-add services and more control over services and expenses. Because customers want more options for payments, whether online or offline, customer experience will increase in importance as part of a dynamic order model. As demands for convergent charging and billing increase, they must become an integral part of the SDP, to expose to users the experience they want and expose to developers the BSS capabilities they need.
The SDP will therefore play an important role
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"IBM, HP, and Accenture increasingly talk of hooking SDP into BSS." |
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in maintaining customer satisfaction at those times that are critical to the perception of quality and customer experience—when subscribing, when consuming, when topping up shrinking credit, when using promotions, when spending at peak times, and during any occasion where there might otherwise be a risk of customer churn.
A Path to Two-sided Business Models
For all of the reasons discussed above, many believe SDP components will be more closely integrated with BSS. On one side are the network and gateway layers: adapters to networks; and service and application middleware (identity management, content management, Web Services, device management). And on the other side are BSS components: business rules, OSS/BSS support, and integrated CRM/PRM.
CSPs are going through transformations to bring systems together for more efficiency. Key to the transformations are product catalogs, which help provide a consistent experience to customers across the board. What a customer sees is what a partner provides, is what a CSR supports, and is what an IT person has enabled. A consistent view can only be bolstered by integration of BSS and SDPs, and will help operators handle the acceleration of demand for applications, and help simplify the process of app development across multiple platforms. That can help ensure the most robust and expedient choices possible for customers—consumer, enterprise, and 3rd party.
With integration of SDP and BSS, operators will be able to expose parts of their environments to third-party ecosystems when composing new services. They will participate as an enabler in a two-sided business model where exposure of assets like call control, location, and messaging to third-party developers will mean more value as partners to 3rd parties and to consumers of the services 3rd parties create.
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About Conceptwave: ConceptWave is a leading provider of customer, product, and order lifecycle management solutions that enable communications service providers to rapidly introduce new market offers and to empower superior customer experience. ConceptWave's unique offer is to provide an end-to-end catalog-driven suite of order fulfillment automation software with ConceptWave Order Care and Rapid CRM. ConceptWave products and solutions enable service providers to address competitive requirements and simplify the management of customers, products, and orders, for any product, on any network, in any market, using any channel. ConceptWave is headquartered in Toronto with presence in Americas, Europe and Asia. |
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