Driven by rising competitive pressures, new technologies and quality of service concerns of customers, the demand for operation systems support/ business systems support (OSS/BSS) is growing steadily in the Indian telecom market. In such an environment, streamlining and optimising operations are a must for telecom service providers.

The deployment of OSS/BSS, which focuses on service fulfilment, service assurance and billing for all legacy, next-generation and hybrid networks, ensures a leaner operations environment by reducing costs and increasing service quality and manageability. Over the years, OSS/BSS has assumed special importance in the Indian telecom market, where there is very little scope left to compete on the basis of prices due to the prevailing rock-bottom margins.

Service providers are increasingly focusing on deploying new and innovative valueadded services and delivering superior quality services. This strategy assumes even more importance in the wake of the entry of mobile virtual network players. This has fuelled the growth of OSS/BSS solutions brought about by emerging services such as service delivery platforms (SDPs), which aid faster rollout of services.

With the expected rollout of 3G and Wi-Max services following the auction of spectrum (slated for January 2010), the importance of OSS/BSS is expected to increase further. Explains a leading telecom operator, "The more the number of technologies, the more the number of elements that need to be managed to carry out provisioning for, and be attached to, the billing system. This will require an OSS/BSS port that is capable of communicating and managing all the different systems. There are ports for operations and billing through one platform."

However, along with the opportunities, there are also several new challenges that OSS/BSS vendors must address. For instance, in the case of 3G and Wi-Max, it is essential to focus on SLA-based services since the systems should be able to bring in predictability as well as manageability.The entire BSS framework should also be more configurable and service providers should be able to launch new plans and services without making changes in the core product.Mobile number portability (MNP), which is likely to be launched in January 2010, also presents many opportunities. According to Shirish Munj, vice-president, IT, Tata Teleservices, the launch of MNP is likely to increase the importance of OSS/BSS since "apart from the regular impact in order to support MNP processes like porting, gateway integration, etc., various initiatives are either in progress or in the pipeline in the areas of enhancing customer experience and controlling churn. The focus is on an end-to-end framework that tracks various parameters, predicts customer churn, enables online and seamless customer communication, and ensures retention."

Challenges

Lack of a uniform standard
With an increasing number of vendors offering a wide variety of OSS/BSS solutions, it is difficult to select a vendor who provides the right services at the right price and has the ability to continuously evolve its products. Operators must be able to identify the right mix of applications without compromising on costs, ease of configurability, extensibility and manageability. For instance, while one vendor may be good at planning synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) transmission circuits, another may be better in the metro Ethernet domain. Similarly, while one vendor may offer strong auto-discovery capabilities, it may not be strong in modelling and representation of assets.

However, while telecom operators often use a best-of-breed approach, at some point, in trying to choose the best vendor with the best product or service, they must integrate the offerings from disparate vendors into a unified whole that meets their particular needs. Consequently, this becomes difficult due to the lack of a common, uniform standard supporting multiple devices and solutions across multiple networks. While vendors have been trying to develop and implement standards that make it easy to integrate applications from multiple vendors, these efforts have not been very successful.

Implementation hurdles
According to telecom operators, a lot of customisation is required for implementing OSS/BSS, which takes time and is often quite difficult. The evolving service provider landscape has resulted in a metamorphosis of OSS/BSS suites –­ from being relatively simple platforms consisting of business rules, workflows, transaction processing to a voice/time division multiplexing and a more sophisticated IP/Ethernet world.

Moreover, often, the telecom equipment manufacturer supplies the OSS/BSS layers to operators at the initial stage of setting up networks along with the other operational equipment. Operators opt for this arrangement as it is cheaper.However, this becomes an issue in the long run as operators expand their services and deploy multi-vendor networks and products using two or three network management systems for service activation. Implementing common OSS/BSS layers then becomes a tough task.

It is, hence, important for service providers to plan the OSS/BSS layer as a separate parallel strategy alongside network deployment. In this regard, NGOSS by the TeleManagement Forum and OSS through Java initiative offer practical implementation guidelines for new OSS applications and interfaces.

Legacy issues
Some service providers today carry an operational burden in the form of their legacy architecture. Legacy systems are often inflexible and create additional costs associated with process duplication. According to Kuldip Singh, director, technical, MTNL, "We have a legacy network and some legacy elements. The billing system has been there for some time, so when this has to be integrated with other services, a lot of work will have to be done.Unlike the new system, the older system did not have open interfaces and it would require a lot of effort to integrate them."

However, many operators are currently migrating to NGOSS/BSS, which enables one to control every element and provide every service through a single platform.Says Singh, "Our wish-list for vendors would include open systems and open application programming interfaces."

Service providers have to thus create reliable transformation processes to enable migration to new OSS/BSS environments. It is important to keep evolving and upgrading to new system architectures that are based on components built as per open standards, in order to ensure future flexibility for adopting new products quickly and smoothly. Operators can go for pre-integrated solutions, utilising service-oriented architecture that facilitates future-proof integration and focus.

The NGOSS advantage

For telecom service providers deploying fresh IP-based networks, adopting new-generation operations systems and software (NGOSS) is essential, as the classic version will not support such networks. A business solution framework and architecture for OSS/BSS which takes into account best practices across companies in the telecom and enterprise sectors, NGOSS has many advantages over the classic version of OSS.

Likely to witness significant growth rates over the next few years, according to research firm Forrester, NGOSS enables telecom service providers to maximise their return on investment (RoI) and provide the process agility, flexibility and business service reusability necessary to support new technologies and services.

For instance, NGOSS utilises a common communications infrastructure, which allows each application to plug into a shared mechanism, supporting communication amongst all applications. This level of standardisation allows independent software vendors to plan ahead for integration, as they can know exactly how their applications will be integrated.

NGOSS solutions also enable different OSS/BSS applications to share data amongst themselves. This improves manageability as applications usually identify basic operational concepts differently. The manner in which one application defines or classifies customers, products, order information and so on, will be different from another.

Currently, vendors are making significant investments in their NGOSS portfolios in the light of strong growth expectations. However, most telecom operators are still at early stages of their NGOSS rollouts, reflecting the many challenges that must be addressed in this area. Moreover, according to industry sources, many NGOSS plans are still driven by technology push rather than by business pull. This is due to several reasons.

For instance, executing a manageable migration to a new OSS/BSS architecture that supports new ways of conducting business and dealing with customers requires substantial amounts of time, often several years, since a "big bang" approach is too dangerous and carries the risk of fatally disrupting critical business operations. The lengthy migration period, in turn, is costly as the legacy system needs to coexist with the new OSS/BSS in order to facilitate the exchange of information between the two architectures.

Such high costs create confidence problems within the organisation as the key motivation for deploying a new architecture is specifically cost savings. Often, the double costs due to the simultaneous operation of the legacy system and the new OSS/BSS during the period of migration are not fully visible in the initial decision-making process.The senior management of companies needs to realise the real costs involved in implementing a new architecture.