Make way for new a generation of OSS/BSS environments

Existing operations and business support system (OSS/BSS) environments cannot provide the required support to face the challenges abundant in a landscape marked by intensifying competition, reduced time-to-market, efficiency improvement, and growing customer expectations. This is the warning from research firm Frost & Sullivan, which released a report this week highlighting the need to bridge the gap between OSS/BSS in order to overcome these challenges.

OSS/BSS is the heart of a business operation, supporting the service providers’ day-to-day operations, but Frost believes that scattered systems provided by various vendors cannot communicate efficiently, limiting the possibilities for coordination between service design and technical requirements.

According to Frost, OSS/BSS integration facilitates communication within the business and can shorten time-to-market for new products; help operators shift their business model from dumb pipe to service enabler; enable the introduction of more personalised tariff plans based on real network usage; and give operators a holistic view of the customer across the whole architecture.

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The most fundamental OSS/BSS capabilities are the building blocks that must be part of every customer-centric and business transformation strategy going ahead. “Service providers are used to purchasing best-of-breed systems and developing certain in-house software. This has led to the creation of isolated software silo architectures, designed around separate technologies or services that now have to be broken down, in order to keep up with market requirements in order to offer many services at a very fast pace. Integrating the OSS and BSS environments is the answer,” said Piotr Machnik, business development centre director at BSS/OSS firm Comarch, which supported the research.