Letter from the Editor
In article I wrote several years ago, I declared the official "Death of OSS." And it had, in fact, been dead for quite some time by the time I made the declaration. And I know some of
you, even now, may be thinking of that old clunky OSS you may have bought from Cramer, Syndesis, or Telcordia, all of which have been bought, sold, and resold since then. And you may be
thinking that you still use those systems still to this day. Which may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that they are still quite dead. And by dead, I mean void of
life. In other words, "life" is not "life support."
Business Support Systems (BSS) aren't far behind either. Gone are the days of a multimillion dollar, megalithic Intec or Amdocs BSS project to create the fabled "single bill." Try to
create a single bill for hundreds of billions of fractional IoT connections with a myriad of latency, network slicing, and SLA requirements. I dare you. I'll wait.
And I haven't even begun to talk about third-party collaboration, partner monetization, security, end-to-end automation, or the omnichannel customer experience (CX), the totality of which reduces
legacy B/OSS to wistful pile of ash. But it may not be over just yet. Rocketing of the ash are new innovations which stand to change, well, just about
everything.
In this issue of Pipeline, we explore the evolution of support systems. We hear from CHR Solutions on the importance of integrating CRM with B/OSS, and Panviva on how to take CX omnichannel. Ziotis shares insights on the shift to digital OSS and
CenturyLink tells us about The Next Internet Revolution and the needs that
are driving the adoption of blockchain, robotics process automation (RPA) and AI/machine learning. WeDo walks us through fraud risks related to B/OSS planning, network evolution and digital transformation. Infinera explores the explosion in streaming gaming and the opportunity for operators. Aricent tells us how to gain
an edge by capitalizing on mobile edge computing and FNT discusses
resource management in an ever-digital world. All this, with a
digest of the latest industry news included to boot.
We hope you enjoy this and every issue of Pipeline,
Scott St. John
Managing Editor
Pipeline
