China Mobile & Huawei: Build an Agile Assembled IT Platform for BSS to Support the Convergence and Sustainable Development

October 30, 2024

The digital economy has provided a fresh momentum to the expansion of telecommunications services, which were nearing their saturation point.

China Mobile has proposed the business strategy of convergence development of the CHBN (Customer | Home | Business | New). How to enable the convergence development of China Mobile services based on the cloud-native and intelligent transformation of IT support systems? To adapt to this new proposition, China Mobile adheres to the concept of "business transformation drives IT transformation and IT transformation drives business transformation," and communicates and cooperates with TM Forum closely to explore the best practices of TM Forum’s assets and support the efficient integration of these four markets to achieve good results.

In fact, China Mobile mainly faced two major challenges:

The significant differences in IT capabilities among its companies in various provinces cannot meet the requirements for agile response, cost reduction and efficiency enhancement.
The complexity and diversity of requirements in the B2B market and the convergent B2B/B2C market business present challenges beyond high-cost customization methods.

To address those two challenges, China Mobile have made two "transformations" by using TM Forum assets with Huawei.

1. Transform to the assembled IT system

China Mobile has reconstructed the BSS in the new digital intelligence cloud native project by decoupling front-end applications, capability operation platforms, convergent service centers, and business capability service centers. It has built 18 standardized components such as products, customers, orders, charging, rating, billing, payment and settlement in the business capability service centers, decoupling the standardized components based on the autonomous domain design, to achieve the autonomy goals in the different business domains and convergence businesses. Moreover, it introduces AI technologies to build a complete cloud native technology foundation to implement DevAIOps capabilities for distributed and cloud-based applications with scenario-based LLM.

Design standardized data models, services, and applications in a unified manner for five core business service capability centers: customer, product, order, charging, billing, and settlement domains, based on decoupled business service capabilities. China Mobile enables its selected provincial companies to unify design, develop, and standardize test components firstly in five service centers based on cloud native technologies. Then deploy and push the mutual components services into Ability as a Service (AaaS) platform through DevAIOps platform.
Build the AaaS platform and mechanisms. As long as the developed provinces register the shareable services capability on the AaaS platform, others province or authorized sub-legal entities can invoke the services capability from AaaS platform and assemble their own IT system that truly realize the IT capability sharing on the entire network.

Therefore, the development and deployment are all efficient in nationwide network. The requirements can be improved rapidly at a low cost with the mode of “the developed provinces enabling the developing provinces”.

2. Transform to the assembled business model

Adopting the "supermarket" concept, each business department maintains its own designated "shelf" containing standardized products. These products encompass a range of hardware items like WiFi, cameras, and wearable devices, as well as traditional telecom services such as traffic, voice, and private network. Additionally, special software services like cloud computers, cloud mobile phones, and video conferences are also available. The frontline sales can dynamically bundle these standard products to assemble a new converged product with multiple functions that align with the personalized requirements by customers. This approach aims to maximize customer differentiation and fulfil their specific requirements.

Guided by China Mobile Corporation, this practice was initially implemented in Guangdong and swiftly adopted by Hebei, Chongqing, and other provinces.

Double-digit growth was achieved in several segments of convergence market.
The reuse and promotion efficiency of business innovation cases and excellent support capabilities is improved by 50%.
The customer scale and ARPU of the convergence market segment have increased by more than 30%.

This practice has also successfully made it to the shortlist for the Glotel Best Digital Transformation Project Awards 2024.

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