Impact of Emerging Applications on OSS/BSS for Network Operators

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Imagine being picked up at the airport and, while en route to your hotel, you get to view your location and recommended sightseeing excursions and restaurants along the way on a small screen in the taxi. Imagine calling the hotel and getting back an SMS message with the direction on how to get there from your current location with no need to remember or write anything down.

You could also be at home watching your favorite sport when you receive a notice over your TV that you just received new content showing pictures of your friends enjoying themselves at a bar and how much fun they are having. Then, you decide that it is worth joining them.

While possibly no specific “killer” application or service is emerging, services utilizing a rich and blended set of innovative application and communication components and capabilities may yield tremendous value for users. Customers want their communications experience to be seamlessly delivered to their TV set, their mobile phone, their games console and their PCs. The access method and the device type are no longer relevant to them: they want ‘anywhere' ‘anytime' communications.

Using service delivery enablers such as user profile, identity management, presence/location, access control, and a SOA-compliant development and real-time environments, application software developers can create an unlimited amount of new applications that service providers could offer to their customer base. A roadblock to implement these services today as fast and furious as they are generated is the delay and difficulty to drop these applications in the network operator back office systems (OSS and BSS) and bring these applications into main stream due to lack of standards. In order to effectively compete in today's fast-paced network environment, network operators need to ensure that their network provides fast service delivery while providing effective links to their OSS/BSS back office so end-users can subscribe to these advanced services and content be accessed from any device type or access method. In addition, to delivering these advanced services, a service provider needs to support Service Level Agreements (SLAs), troubleshoot any problems as well as isolate any network and application performance issues and have flexible ways to bill for these services in ways that may differ from the traditional methods they were using. 

Complex Value Chain

In the traditional network environment, service providers deliver end-to-end services and control the entire communications supply chain, with possibly the exception of interconnection agreements with other providers. It took a few years but with the help of self-care tools, high-speed Internet access service finally became capable to be completely self-installed. New advanced applications and services like IPTV creates more complexities in the value chain because service providers have to manage newer home network devices such as residential gateway, setup boxes and IP phones in a scalable fashion as well as managing sharing agreements with content providers.

The Silo Challenge

To take advantage of new and innovative applications that emphasize customer and personalized lifestyle services, service providers recognize the shift that is required in their back-office away from silo-based operations built for stand-alone services. For many operators it is a tough challenge to evolve when starting from thousands of OSS/BSS applications that need to be migrated and consolidated to achieve any access type and devices accessing any content.

To reduce operating expenses, many operators are looking to consolidate and transform their OSS/BSS. The new service expectations of their residential and enterprise customers is a major trend driving the next-generation transformation projects service providers are preparing for, which take place over a number of years. They involve the migration of existing services towards an IP transport (such as VoIP services) as well as the introduction of new services such as those based on IMS technology or IPTV services. In addition, people and processes must make the transformation through training, re-alignment, augmented procedures which optimize the organization and make it efficient for IP dominant networks and services. To succeed, such projects need to be guided by a clear vision of the target service delivery environment.

Furthermore, with the advance of new technology such as the Web 2.0, new services are being developed by end-users themselves on the Internet. Service providers are looking at the use of these technologies and ways to associate external developers with their own environment. Standardization of content acquisition and product catalogue interfaces are important to make these things happen.

Services Architecture

The service delivery environment brings the convergence of IT and Networks. It enables new services that are based on enablers from the service provider as well as from the Internet world. This creates interesting challenges in maintaining carrier grade aspects of a service - such as, low latency, reliability, availability and interactions.

The challenges of service providers cited above, given the services now spanning both IT and network worlds, Network Operations & IT organizations have needs to align their processes, operational benchmarks, and systems architectures.

Billing and Rating

The fast introduction of new services and technologies means an outlay of capital expenditure which must be paid for and in a short time. New services value chains require new real-time rating flexibilities for providing various type of bundles, discounting, promotion for all payment type (pre or post-paid) for any usages of network access or services content. Given the complexity and evolution costs of legacy billing systems care must be taken in the manner in which new services will be billed or charged in real-time either on existing silos or progressively migrating to new IT transformation program dealing with migration or replacement of their IT and IN BSS/OSS components and integration of new underlying charging technologies such as IMS diameter.

Introduction of service blending, e.g. involving elements of IMS, IPTV and Internet services, creates additional requirements on real-time rating and billing tools.

Service Delivery Framework

Because of standards work for IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems), IPTV and computing architecture advances during the last few years and other related trends, Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) have become the en vogue way to describe the solutions required to achieve new services. SDPs are intended to enable rapid development and deployment of new converged multimedia services.

Given the numerous interpretations in industry of the non-standard term SDP, and acknowledging the need for a standard definition, the TM Forum (TMF) has decided to work on the standardization of a “Service Delivery Framework (SDF)”seen from a service provider point of view. Together with other industry groups, TM Forum will work on getting to a commonly agreed terminology and functional view of such an SDF. This will then serve as the base for further work on management interfaces and on identifying new operational processes around this SDF.

The SDF thus is the service delivery framework targeted by service providers that is designed to support

• Rapid turn-up and rollout of converged services

• Flexible and extensible service features

• Reduced cost per unit to increase margin

• Higher ARPU by matching subscriber needs quickly

The common definition of Service Delivery Framework is today a work in progress. The TM Forum and its members are making stride in this area and meeting with other standard bodies to achieve some consensus. Phase 1 of the SDF program included a definition of a Service Delivery Framework (SDF), which targets to provide a standardized business and operational framework that enables effective delivery and management of emerging services, such as IMS-based and IPTV, and that combines telco and IT management processes, i.e. TM Forum eTOM and UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC)'s ITIL.

A Service Delivery Framework therefore consists of the following main domains

• Management of the new Product Lifecycle environment

• Service creation (applications), including reusable components / enablers

• Managing the Service Execution and Enabler environment

• Adaptation/definition of OSS/BSS processes for SDF management

The Product Lifecycle environment is defined as an environment that creates, deploys, and integrates services and compositions of services from reusable components. Reusable components, with well-defined service interfaces and contracts, support the creation of service compositions. The execution environment represents the hardware and software needed to run the services/components and manages where these service components execute according to the created compositions. SDF management is responsible for such functions as the product lifecycle and moving the service/compositions from inception to execution.

Future phases of the SDF program as well as TM Forum Catalyst showcases will work on touch points between the SDF and the OSS/BSS, and on potential enhancements that may be required to the eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map) process framework, to the Shared Information /Data ( SID ) model, and to the TAM (Telecom Applications Map). Because of that, I would highly recommend that application software developers get involved with the TM Forum ( www.tmforum.org ) and join in the SDF program so they participate to the work being done on the integration between the new software applications and the OSS/BSS.

Conclusion

It is clear that because of the complexity and wide scope of comprehensive OSS/BSS platforms, few players in the industry have the required skills, technology and people to implement such a service delivery framework and carry out the migration to the new OSS/BSS supporting today's as well as the future innovative services. This not only requires OSS/BSS knowledge, but also extensive expertise in the underlying networking technologies needed to correlate network transformation evolution to the right operations and OSS/BSS solution and increasing number of application integration points. In short, service providers may be seeking support from partners to assist them in these complex endeavors as they develop their best fit and flexible service delivery environment that not only allows for the cost-optimized introduction of new services, but also for their carrier-grade assurance and billing. Partnering on consolidation and transformation projects ensures that they themselves can stay focused on dealing with the pressing dynamics of business today.

Choosing the right partner is key to developing a flexible service delivery environment. Each service provider has different starting points, legacy systems, network infrastructures, deployment goals, and business and operational processes. Their transformation partner must possess—and be able to apply—NGN/IMS and triple-play networking experience with extensive application integration and network-management experience, business/operations process reengineering and OSS/BSS knowledge, network integration, software integration and project management expertise. To be effective, the transformation partner must ensure that service providers create, plan, manage and execute the right network transformation and operations strategy, as well as be intimately involved with best practices and standards that are being developed such as TM Forum's NGOSS and UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC)'s ITIL.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Johanne joined Alcatel-Lucent in 1994 through the Newbridge acquisition. Currently, Johanne is director of communications for the global services group representing Alcatel-Lucent's industry-leading OSS/BSS solutions. Johanne is the spokesperson for OSS and network management products and solutions with industry analysts and the press as well as member of the TM Forum board and officer of the TM Forum representing the Supplier Community. She is a frequent speaker at OSS conferences and represents Alcatel-Lucent at various global forums. During her 20 years in the industry, she has worked as a support engineer, a product manager and marketing director, always focused on the Carrier operations. She holds 2 bachelor degrees and a patent on frame relay congestion.

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