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Editorial - The Dragon Has Awoken A powerful Dragon has awoken in the past couple of years as China has seen considerable acceleration in the process of deregulation within its expansive market. With the largest population (1.3 billion) and a 179 million PSTN subscriber base, a number that is still growing at an explosive rate, this telecom arena has become the best bet for service providers, and software and hardware vendors. The split in China Telecom has turned this Dragon into a two-headed creature, each entity competing with the other for a larger share of market. This, in turn, has improved the yield per customer. Competition, introduced in the local loop, will force the carriers to be more innovative, paving the way for more sophisticated Operation Support Systems, CRM and billing packages. While language constraints will dictate that all software support Mandarin. OSS Market in China Although, overall, the Chinese telecom market is booming, service providers in this area have done little towards putting an OSS structure in place. One raw estimate suggests that the OSS expenditure in China is less than 1% of the infrastructure capital being utilized. To the benefit of OSS providers, this is expected to change in the next few years as it is anticipated that Chinese carriers will switch their focus from hardware to software and at the same time increase their spending by as much as six fold. The high level of optimism that this shift will lead to OSS spending is based on the fact that wireless market is growing at the rate of 25-30% each year and Service providers have to date spent minimally in terms of overall budget on their OSS solutions - leaving a large hole in this area. The need now for a strong back office will become critical to continued success. Though, until now, the Chinese market has been much more oriented towards hardware, with an increasing subscriber base and increasing competition, service providers are looking to OSS solutions to better their time to market. The OSS approach will also act as a service differentiator between providers and we will see them begin to develop a systematic methodology with long-term perspective. Eftia's OSS: Right solution at right time at right place Given that Service providers have identified the need for back office support, in order to increase their operational efficiency and achieve better time to market, selecting the right solution from the plethora of software available in the market is challenging at best. Increasing competition and falling profit margins dictate that service providers opt for a solution that can effectively meet the budgetary constraints set out by their organization. In addition, the fluctuating economic conditions of the market mean that service providers will seek a solution with a "Go as you grow" capability and a minimum payback period that allows them to see a fairly immediate ROI. Eftia OSS Solutions Inc, an Ottawa, Canada based company, have a firm grasp of putting value in your investment, as well as has a proven track record in OSS development and deployment. The Return On Investment (ROI) from this organization has a minimum payback period, and the value proposition comes in terms of increase in revenue, as well as a reduction in both manpower and capital costs. Master.Scribe, Eftia's integrated suite of OSS solutions, enables customers to provision services (basic telephone services, long distance services, DSL, high-speed data lines between sites, etc.); control inventory (switches, routers, cell sites, etc.), support operations (trouble tickets), and manage numbers (telephone numbers, Internet addresses, etc.) - all in an automated package that gets you to market faster and at a lower cost. Fulfilling the needs of service providers who require an out-of-the-box standardized application, with plug and play capability, Eftia aids their customers in automating their back office faster and more seamlessly than before. Eftia's Master.Scribe suite (e.g. inventory management, services order management, number management & customer care) is fully inter-operable with other existing software packages. This allows service providers to spend less time on integration thus saving money and resources and adding value to the OSS investment they have made. Eftia's product can integrate with any external applications (billing, service activation, network management, etc.), through an extensive suite of application programming interfaces (API's), to form seamless, end-to-end, business solutions for its customers. These API's also support a variety of data transfer protocols and mechanisms (e.g. CORBA, JAVA, XML, C, SQL, ODBC, JDBC, CLI, DDE, OLE). Eftia's OSS through Java* Initiative (OSS/J) will allow for the introduction of technology to support OSS solutions for next generation networks. It will also reduce integration cost throughout the value chain, and foster a market of interoperable and interchangeable OSS components. Eftia's product suite has crossed both the geographical and the language barrier in its development. Master.scribe can be adapted and configured to support any international language; be it Mandarin or Spanish or Hindi. The web capability of Master.Scribe allows users to connect to System through a web browser, from any remote location. With Eftia's "product" based OSS, customers can be productive faster, be able to adjust to changes in market conditions, and at the same time maintain a reasonable cost structure. Eftia has found this product-based approach effective for quick deployment of solutions as well as the realization of related benefits -- cost-effectiveness, flexibility and scalability. In all, Eftia's Master.Scribe enables customers to master their mission-critical business and operations processes, while reducing the time to market of services, and lowering overall operational costs - fulfilling a need, which is long desired by service providers. About Eftia Master.Scribe is an integrated suite of OSS solutions that enables Eftia customers to master their mission-critical business and operations processes, reduce the time to market of services, and lower overall operational costs. The suite provides comprehensive order provisioning and fulfillment; problem management; telecom circuit and asset inventory management; and Internet protocol (IP) address and telephone number management. Eftia also offers a configurable OSS interconnection gateway. Eftia is a significant contributor to the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) led by the TeleManagement Forum, and is a focus member of the OSS through Java™ Initiative. Eftia is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Please visit www.eftia.com for more information. Eftia and Master.Scribe are trademarks of Eftia OSS Solutions Inc. For more information, please contact: Farrah Jinha Karen Arvelo
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