OSS/BSS: The New Frontier

The telecommunications industry is rich in acronyms, one of the best known but also the most underappreciated is probably OSS/BSS (Operational Support Systems/Business Support Systems) or OSS for short. Nothing is less glitzy but also more critical to keep a network up and running than a performance management application or an alarm system. Nothing sounds less exciting but at the same time is more instrumental in deploying new services than a trouble-ticketing system or mediation software. Most recently, the Director of converged services for a large carrier told me that 80% of the work to take new services to market lied in the operational aspect (provisioning, billing, monitoring). No surprise then that worldwide, carriers are spending in excess of $30B per year on their OSS infrastructure. According to the TeleManagement Forum (TMF), for every one dollar spent on OSS software, an additional $1-4 is spent on integrating that software into an existing environment. Needless to say that this a one-time effort that is repeated by all carriers around the world.

Just as communications service providers had to adapt their existing OSS to deploy IP VPN, VoIP, and 3G services, the recent mergers have added yet another challenge. But the most difficult of these transformations lies ahead of us: IP TV and Fixed Mobile Convergent (FMC) services are just being readied and their complexity is of another magnitude, due in part to the value chain going outside of the traditional network boundaries (content, advertisement, partnerships, circle of trust). This is the new frontier. Flexibility and agility are paramount features of the Next Generation OSS to be able to rapidly deploy, monitor and bill for new services that we can't even fathom today. As for IP TV and VoIP, I actually believe that superior customer service and simplified customer experience will be key differentiators for carriers. The simple reason is: for any product and services, the easier it is for you to interact and purchase (without the sticker shock), the more you consume, but we are still very far away from that experience.

A few years ago, when we looked at how Sun was going to address these upcoming challenges for our customers, we were obviously not going to throw hundreds of thousands of consultants into this problem, but instead looked at how open standards, innovation and participation could bring us closer to the solution. With our industry partners and TMF's endorsement, Sun has been leading the OSS/J initiative to simplify OSS integration by maximizing usage of Java-based middleware and other IT technologies (XML, SOA). Some of the carriers actively participating are: BT, CANTV, Covad, Vodafone. The first results were beyond our expectations (see a recent article about these benefits), and as carriers are going through the second or third deployments, the results are even greater. From a Sun perspective and to be brutally honest, we have reduced part of the multibillion dollars integration tax (where Sun was not playing - doesn't have, won't have an army of consultants) into a $800 million dollars middleware opportunity (where Sun has changed the financial value proposition of software delivery) that is helping the entire industry make operational support systems truly operational. Couldn't have done it without the community of developers working hand in hand with standard bodies like TMF. I recommend you check the announcements from Sun and our partners at the upcoming TeleManagement World in May in Nice to know how we are taking this to the next stage, big news coming!

Why is network identity important?

Just about every small, medium and large company in the developed world is hugely dependent on the internet: communications, supply chain, design, marketing, finance, sales, support, and other critical business activities are using the internet to increase efficiency, scale, and economic growth. Consumers, citizens, communities and families are now relying on the network to better communicate, learn, share knowledge, and increase mobility. The reliance on the network means that outages and virus outbreaks are simply no longer acceptable. Phishing and pharming among other network criminal activities are responsible for companies and consumers losing billions of dollars.
Figures don't include lost opportunities due to consumers' and suppliers' wariness of internet-based transactions. Authentication is one of the biggest pushes by online watchdogs. In a recent conversation with Paul Mockapetris who co-wrote DNS, we discussed how DNSSEC can better guarantee that the information retrieved from a web site actually came from the intended web site and not from an imposter. A user can eliminate spam by opting to receive e-mail only from people who have authenticated their identity. To put it simply: strong authentication means trust, trust means more transactions.

Why does it matter to carriers and their partners?
According to the Liberty Alliance Project there will be 1 billion Liberty-enabled devices and
identities by the end of 2006, specifically:

• 120 million citizen identities in the e-government sector
  
• 585 million identities and devices in the mobile and telecommunications
  sector
  
• 72 million online service provider users able to leverage Liberty identity
  specifications
  
• 20 million Liberty-enabled identities in the technology and business sectors
  with organizations managing a variety of B2B and B2C services

Communication service providers manage more identities than anybody else on the network. The advent of converged networks is making the distinction between network subscriber (who pays the DSL bill?) and network users (who downloads what?) more important from a security, personalization, and reporting standpoint. While transforming their networks to support triple or quadruple play, carriers need to work with partners to develop circles of trust that will increase participation and transactions. At CTIA last week, Lucent and Sun showed a prototype demonstrating their collaboration to simplify subscribers' access to wireline and wireless services whether they are based on web, mobile telephony, IPTV or IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architectures. Over the next months, I will discuss other solutions and how Sun is helping carriers simplify identity management, improve subscribers' experience, and monetize their networks.

Why is participation important?
Why is music download on phone handsets measured in billions of dollars (compared to the paltry music download business on PCs, even with iTunes)? Because phones are authenticated (with a Java SIM card), content and network providers can ensure legitimate use of media content. Earlier this month, Movielink and CinemaNow have offered consumers the opportunity to download new movies at the same time as they were hitting the DVD shelves. The DVD industry, like the CD, floppy disk, VHS, and LP industries before, is poised to disappear sooner or later. The participation on the network is changing the way digital content is created, managed, distributed, and consumed. The result is more revenue for content creators as authentication and convenience fuel commerce. In turn, the success of music download on the wireless network can happen on all networks for all types of multimedia content.
Network identity should not be under the control of only one company (a la Passport) or even one single industry (banks and governments have a role to play in federating network users
identities).

To finish on a humoristic yet important note, here's a clip describing what identity should not be.

New data retention rules for European service providers

The European Union recently passed a new legislation to force fixed-line, mobile, and internet service providers to keep details of their customers' communications for up to one year
(only 6 months for IP based communications) for the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of terrorism and organized crime.

The data retention directive defines the data required to be kept to:

• trace and identify the source and destination of a communication,
  
• identify the date, time and duration of a communication, and
  
• identify the type of communication, location and type of communication device The content of the communications will not be recorded. I counted over 44 data points to be stored based on the type of communication network used!

The European Union countries will now have until August 2007 to implement the directive, and according to the legislative text: "it is appropriate to foresee that Member States reimburse demonstrated additional costs incurred in order to comply with the obligations imposed on them as a consequence of this Directive". Still the new directive will have a deep impact on the European communications industry. As an example, since text messages are delivered via the SS7 network, data should be retained for one year. Over 100 billion text messages were exchanged in the EU last year, even with a minimal 1 KB of data for each (hopefully we'll learn from Y2K here), it's a new 100 TB of data to be stored. How many emails and VoIP calls will the 230M internet users in the European Union send every 6 months is certainly in the same order of magnitude as are fixed and mobile phone calls (terminated or not). In total, it's probably several Petabytes of new storage to be deployed in the carriers' infrastructure.

Today, over 1/3 of the world's data is archived on Sun storage tape library equipment thanks to our recent acquisition of StorageTek, and Sun can help reduce the strain on the carriers' staff, budget... and sanity. The upcoming IMS infrastructure will improve the management of subscriber data across all applications and networks, and reduce the need to develop usage collection in multiple silos.

Communications service providers can also use the new stringent data retention rules and turn them into a competitive weapon rather than another cost center. By collecting usage data from multiple applications and networks in a single place, carriers can unlock vital business intelligence on how their subscribers are using their networks. This directive represents an
opportunity to re-think revenue assurance and seriously address revenue leakage and fraud management across all networks.