BSS - change and adapt, or die

Telecoms.com periodically invites third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Tony Gillick, Tony is GVP Solutions Management at Openet, takes a look at the current state of the BSS business.

Recent news from Ericsson that it is spending SEK 6.1billion (approx. £530million) to restructure its BSS business comes as little surprise. Approaches to operator mobile service monetisation and underlying BSS has changed beyond recognition over the past few years. Traditional delivery mechanisms, when operators tied themselves to one major vendor for all its service monetisation needs are over – and the telecoms industry needs to accept it and move on.

The big bang approach to BSS transformation doesn’t work. For Ericsson to base their Revenue Manager solution on an end to end BSS stack that would replace existing legacy BSS was a brave move. The rewards could have been very high, but then again so were the risks.

Monetising new services is already going to be an uphill struggle for operators, adopting the right tools can make life all the more easy for them. These tools will see the overhaul of service delivery models and service architectures, and the brave adoption of new technologies and approaches. For the telecoms industry, such change is daunting and risky but more important than ever before.

A chance at survival

In today’s world, everywhere you turn there’s a vendor or an operator talking about change and the need to evolve. Yet, for many, it’s evident that the definition of digital transformation remains unclear. Operators and vendors must remove themselves from the echo-chamber in which they find themselves. They need to find a new source of truth, one that encourages and promotes innovation and new thinking, but also highlights their failings, and allows them to successfully explore the new trends driving industry change.

Doing this is tough, however. For the legacy operator, adapting to quickly evolving industry and consumer trends can prove daunting and complex, and very much out of their comfort zone. But today’s reality means that consumers are no longer prepared to wait for their operator to act and deliver the service they need. Consumers have little loyalty to their operator brand and will churn if they feel they aren’t getting value for money or the service they want, when they want it. At the same time, industry trends and the availability of cloud-native technologies is allowing new players, who previously had no skin in the telecoms game, to enter the market. In the face of these new entrants, who have a wealth of new applications and services to offer, legacy operators must take action if they are to have a chance of survival.

What does change look like?

Understanding what change really means is probably operators’ and vendors’ biggest challenge. Yet these answers can be easily found in the trends driving industry transformation.

Operators and vendors must change how they think about transformation. It’s not enough to simply adopt new technologies, operators and vendors must truly get behind the concepts such as open source technologies, and the sharing of new ideas and methods to drive innovation. According to a 2018 TM Forum industry survey, cultural obstacles are one of the biggest issues when it comes to encouraging transformation. Operators and vendors need to leave behind their legacy mindset and begin to embrace collaboration and partnerships. Allowing new relationships to flourish based on mutual understanding and benefit will help underpin digital transformation’s success. Operators just cannot afford to be shackled by their supplier, and similarly, vendors must have the trust of their operator customer to take risks and innovate through new technologies and approaches.

It is only through this cultural change and collaborative approach that operators and vendors will truly be able to leverage the capabilities of new technologies and approaches such as AI, microservices and DevOps. These approaches will be key to developing the platform-based tools and services that operators will need to deploy new offers rapidly, and monetize new services such as 5G and IoT.

The road to digital transformation success is a long and winding one, with many uncertainties along the way. Digital transformation cannot be seen as a destination or an end-goal, it’s an ever-evolving ‘thing’ that will continue to be so long as the industry exists. Operators and vendors have their work cut out to make change a reality, but it’s by learning from the failures of others, and embracing new thinking and new tools that the industry will truly change. In doing so, operators will start to reap the rewards of launching new services by seeing subscriber churn decrease and customer engagement increase. Ultimately, it’ll be the difference between them thriving and merely surviving.

“Tony Gillick is the GVP Solutions Management for Openet. Previous to this Tony has headed up product management, solutions engineering and systems architecture for Openet. He’s been with Openet for more than 15 years and has managed BSS implementations for some of the leading service providers in the world.”