For the communications industry, the E-business revolution represents an opportunity to convert the old telecom infrastructure into a fundamental E-business tool. Basic communications services can be combined with software capabilities to enable a packaged trading service that facilitates access to information and improved methods of doing business with customers and suppliers.

One reason that communications companies are drawn to E-business technology is because it can improve the day-to-day operations of their own businesses. At present, communications companies have very rudimentary abilities to do business with each other. Stories of unanswered faxes and E-mails, and telephone tag abound worldwide as companies with decades-old systems infrastructures struggle to keep up with demand and new entrants.

As a result, telecommunications companies are finding they need to invest in the basics that will let them do business more efficiently. This gives them an opportunity to add E-business capability to their systems, and allows them to position themselves as E-business players.

Investments for now and the future

An essential part of adapting to the dynamic communications industry is adopting effective back-office support that can handle demand and innovation. For this reason, operational support systems (OSS) are quickly gaining recognition as the linchpin of successful business. Investment in management systems was estimated at about $16 billion US in 1998, according to a study conducted by the TeleManagement (TM) Forum.

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One new entrant had purchased more than 30
different OSS applications and none of them
worked together

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Although that number included substantial investment to keep legacy systems running, the trend toward buying third-party software is quite clear. Service providers are looking to buy instead of build, but they have some specific software investment requirements that are key to business and E-business success.

Requirements for OSS investment

In interviews conducted as part of the TM Forum report, service providers named the following general requirements as important:

• Full coverage of critical end-to-end business process functions (service fulfillment, service assurance and billing)
• Easy, low-cost integration of the multiple OSSs needed to support end-to-end processes
• Systems that are reliable, scaleable and cost-effective throughout the life cycle

Let's look at these requirements more closely.

End-to-end business processes

Those interviewed for the TM Forum report see a world where one-touch or zero-touch provisioning is the norm, where customer self-service is routine via Web access, and where new services are created quickly out of basic building blocks. They see a world where employees have the information they need to handle any customer request quickly and competently. They see a world where creating a new service is a matter of configuring and combining software components in new ways. They see the need to work smoothly with peers and competitors as both customers and suppliers, and to meet regulatory requirements for interconnection without incurring a cost burden.

The business processes to support this vision have been identified by service providers who are members of TM Forum. Together they produced a Telecom Operations Map that has become the industry's de facto guide to process automation (see figure). It is against this map that service providers evaluate OSS products for fit within an overall operations picture. It also guides the negotiation of information exchange with others in the value chain. Anyone can view the Telecom Operations Map on the TM Forum's Web site www.tmforum.org.

Integrating OSSs

Software point solutions—even those that can show they fit on the Telecom Operations Map—are not the answer. One new entrant explained that his company had purchased more than 30 different OSS applications and none of them worked together. His company's efforts to automate its business processes had added to the confusion and manual effort needed—the opposite of what was intended.

Service providers want to buy OSSs that can be integrated easily. They are watching closely to see which software vendors are working together to link their applications, and which vendors are making investment in common agreements that implement the Telecom Operations Map (see figure below). One place where they watch is TM Forum, where service providers sponsor Catalyst Projects to encourage vendors to make integration a reality.

Each Catalyst Project involves physical linking of systems, public showcasing (at the semiannual TeleManagement World) and, ultimately, replacement of proprietary interfaces with common ones that meet service provider requirements. With a new group of Catalyst Projects focused on new generation plug and play, we're making good progress towards easing service provider woes.

The systems

When service providers look to outside suppliers for their OSSs, they expect to gain a great deal in exchange for moving to a more standard operational environment. They expect to get better software at a lower cost than any software that they could develop in house.

To help them achieve this, vendors need to be able to take advantage of the right kind of information technology and they need to be able to continue to upgrade their applications as technology advances and costs come down.

TM Forum members have reached agreement on the types of technologies to be used to support applications. This guidance is spelled out in a Technology Integration Map (also available through the TM Forum Web site). It is currently being expanded to identify common application building blocks and to provide very specific advice to developers, making it easier for software vendors to achieve the integration objective without handcrafting agreements with others.

Getting down to E-business

Service providers are building not just to solve today's problems, but to position themselves as providers of an infrastructure that will enable their customers to conduct E-business more effectively. That infrastructure is likely to include not only communications services, but also software to support a trading relationship. By accomplishing this first for themselves, service providers have a chance to be at the forefront as a supplier to other industries.

From Current OSS, Summer 2000, Vol. 1, No. 4. Published by Eftia OSS Solutions.