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!
