Puny Vendors Need Not Apply: A look at the mobile provisioning market

The ability to provision service within minutes is now considered table stakes for any mobile wireless carrier. Mobile provisioning, however, has become more complex, as voice mail, short messaging and even Web access and email become common mobile service offerings. Add to that complexity the fact that there is no single, standard network technology being employed in North America, and it’s no wonder that few vendors have stepped up to tackle the challenge of building the provisioning functionality carriers need. The mobile provisioning space, however, is ready to explode, as most carriers look to roll out new services but continue to rely on older systems designed for the voice-only era or on manual processes as inefficient as most RBOC back offices. Still, though most vendors recognize the opportunity this market presents, there is a remarkable dearth of off the shelf provisioning systems, as carriers shy away from small, unproven OSS vendors.

The State of Mobile Provisioning

There really isn’t any rule for how mobile provisioning is done, but the basics for voice are pretty standard. When a new customer is acquired, subscriber information must be transmitted to a home location register (HLR)—a database to which the wireless network refers in order to track customer services and billing. Once the HLR is updated and the subscriber handset is programmed to communicate with the network correctly, the customer is ready to go.

Because provisioning was pretty simple in the past, carriers never had to employ complex systems to handle it. They relied and continue to rely on rudimentary systems, generally coupled with ordering and customer care, that can transmit messages to the HLR or to the people who program it. “Your typical provisioning system is where someone types up a service order, presses ‘Print,’ and faxes that to five different places,” says Terry Graham, market solutions manager with wireless OSS developer Objective Systems Integrators. As more services become available, each is generally deployed on a stand-alone platform. As a result, this basic provisioning model remains much the same, but the process multiplies as separate messages must be sent to each service platform. There often is no coordination or synchronization between systems and certainly no automated flow-through. Even over-the-air provisioning platforms tend to be standalone systems that aren’t necessarily integrated into a greater OSS infrastructure. This base of relatively isolated systems makes changes to customer accounts and services extremely difficult, does not ensure synchronized service delivery, and reduces a carrier’s ability to offer promotions or bonuses to customers based on account usage. Also, as with any manually intensive process, multiple screen entries and faxes are inefficient and highly error-prone.

The activity hub

What would the ideal mobile provisioning system look like? “If you think about it, it’s almost the reverse of intelligent mediation,” says John Hansen, chief product officer with mobile provisioning vendor Metapath Software International. An advanced provisioning system would behave as an activity hub, receiving service orders and routing all of the required information and commands to the appropriate systems in the proper format, just as a mediation system receives network data, converts it and routes it to downstream applications. (See fig.1, This type of hub may be necessary in an environment where multiple systems need to be notified of service changes, additions or deletions, and where multiple systems make those changes. Orders could come from the traditional customer care systems, Web-based activation systems, active handsets or marketing systems that provision and track promotions such as free voice mail for a month. A provisioning hub could synchronize those changes, notify other systems such as billing and fraud profiling, and improve overall flow-through by eliminating the need for multiple entries at the point of contact. Services like Web or handset-based provisioning—i.e., customer self-care—can’t be enabled without a high level of automated flow-through.

On the drawing board

If developers can conceive of the ultimate mobile provisioning system, why hasn’t anyone built it? The answer to this question includes but goes beyond technology. Technically, it’s possible but extremely difficult. The number of nonstandard network technologies, service platforms, and application types that would have to be accounted for is enormous, particularly in North America. “When you start getting into AMPS, CDMA, TDMA, the way different switch vendors implement services varies widely,” says Adedayo Awomolo, principal consultant with systems integrator Cap Gemini America. “Thus it is very difficult for one vendor to provide a product that would be easy for everyone to buy off the shelf. Also, most wireless services combine lots of components like the MSC, the HLR, a short messaging system and switching center, and all of those components you have to pick and choose aren’t necessarily provisioned exactly the same way.” The number of interfaces alone for which an off-the-shelf system would need to account would take years to develop. Most wireless technology is very new, so no one has developed the interfaces, and few people or organizations have the expertise needed in each specific area to build them. There is more to it than just technology, however.

Clearing the Carrier High Bar

Unlike the competitive wireline market, which has given rise to a new breed of OSS vendors, the mobile wireless market appears to be a much tougher nut to crack. Mobile carriers are wary of smallish vendors; they’ve been burned by information technology nightmares too many times. They want to see a proven track record, a strong customer list and real scalability numbers before they’ll spend a cent on a vendor-built product. In fact, many mobile carriers will opt to build systems in-house at a higher price even if a product that meets their needs is available on the market. “I was in with a carrier who was building a provisioning system, and I asked for the requirements,” says Metapath’s Hansen. “We could prove that we could meet the requirements at a magnitude of transactions that far exceeded what they needed. I thought maybe I was charging too premiere a price, but it was a third of what their IT budget was. They still said, ‘No, we’re going to go out and build it ourselves.’ ”

Hansen believes, and discussions with carriers corroborate, that mobile providers are basically unwilling to give contracts to small vendors for business-critical systems. “Our concern on the vendor side is that they be an established company with a history in the wireless industry,” says Andrew Gordon, vice president of information technology with mobile carrier TeleCorp PCS. “All of our vendors have fairly substantial customer bases in the wireless industry; they’re familiar with the problems that we did experience and will experience in the future. So that is an advantage for us and was a primary selection criterion.”

Most OSS vendors fall into the $20 million to $30 million revenue range and haven’t been around for very long. Further, these vendors have limited mobile domain knowledge and very little experience serving wireless customers; most of their business comes from burgeoning wireline CLECs. Companies such as billing and customer care vendor LHS have had great success in mobile markets because they are large and have a proven history of serving mobile customers around the world. As a result they have also fared well on Wall Street, a factor that carriers also consider. Smaller vendors such as Objective Systems Integrators have done well in mobile because they were in early, landed some big contracts such as McCaw Cellular, and have been able to build a solid track record and a long list of customers. Companies like Lucent Technologies, as big a vendor as they come, are able to sell OSS packages along with network equipment, often giving their customers an economic advantage in doing so.

How big does a vendor need to be to find acceptance in the mobile space? “It was clear when I met with the CEOs that the bar was now $100–$200 million with a proven track record, good products and good consulting services,” Hansen says. “Nobody is in that space, but that is where we are trying to get to rapidly.” He recently merged his Metapath Software with global RF planning system vendor Mobile Systems International (MSI) with the goal of backing up his words. The merger joins his company, with about five customers, to MSI’s more than 80 internationally.

Provisioning Ideas

Though the wireless market is tough to enter, there may be ample space and opportunity for any vendor. The trick is to meet carrier needs as closely as possible. One systems executive with a major PCS carrier explains that while it’s difficult to build a complete product that can please every carrier, a core to build from would be attractive. Carriers don’t seem to be looking for something that works out of the box as much as something that is easily customized to a specific environment. Cap Gemini America’s Awomolo says he works with vendor products all the time, but much of the functionality is stripped away to get to the core, which is then customized. OSI has had success with this sort of approach. Its NetExpert framework provides a rules-based foundation upon which any number of applications can be built. Using rules-based engines rather than hard code, OSI lets its customers take its core functionality and apply it in their unique environments.

WAP replaces OTAP

Activation is perhaps the most critical part of the provisioning process, and it’s another area ripe with opportunity. The technologies in this space are shifting. Over-the-air service provisioning (OTAP) platforms have been around for years but are being supplanted by new technologies. The problem with OTAP is that though it’s based loosely on a standard, the platforms that support it are ultimately proprietary and designed only for voice activation. OTAP doesn’t account for voice mail, messaging or Web service, so it’s necessarily limited in a world where such services are in demand.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), or systems that emulate it, is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for wireless provisioning and service delivery. WAP is a set of protocols meant to standardize how wireless devices communicate with the Internet. It’s being extended to include over-the-air provisioning and customer self-service. This combination of functions allows WAP users to build provisioning and service support functionality on a single platform. Awomolo explains that most carriers he has been in contact with have already abandoned their old OTAP systems in favor of WAP.

WAP is reportedly simple to work with and by providing wireless devices with access to the Internet is a powerful service-enabling technology. In a similar vein, Java is being introduced as a wireless service technology. SIM card developer Schlumberger recently released a SIM card with a Java virtual machine (JVM). This SIM card will help minimize the need for increased memory on a handset, as the card can automatically download applications from the network as needed, running them on the JVM. As well, Java provides a standard API for developers to write to, thus greatly expanding the development community for wireless handset applications. As technologies such as WAP and Java become more prevalent, the need for advanced provisioning systems to manage and coordinate the growing mix of services will increase. Provisioning Ready to Fly

“I’m starting to feel that the whole OSS space is being revisited,” says MSI’s Hansen. “Everyone is quickly going to be on even par as far as bandwidth and clarity. Everything’s going to be digital, the services are going to be the same, and a lot of [the current] systems, the rudimentary ones, are starting to show the strain on capacity as well.” The combination of growing service availability, simplified activation and delivery technologies, constantly increasing subscriber numbers and old, obsolete systems spells opportunity for OSS vendors. Several carrier executives express a belief that the next frontier most likely will be provisioning, especially because it has been so long overlooked and is so central to carrier operations. Small vendors will continue to have trouble satisfying wireless carriers, however. The pent-up demand for systems from long-standing vendors, however, suggests acquisitions may be on the horizon. As smaller vendors build their product suites and begin to win customers, they will become attractive to larger companies looking to move into new markets through acquisition. To this point they’ve stayed away for several reasons. First, gaining domain knowledge in wireless is difficult—there just aren’t that many knowledgeable, experienced people out there. Second, no single vendor dominates the space, and a company like Lucent or LHS is too large to acquire on the cheap. A large company, at this point, would likely need to buy several vendors and become involved in a lengthy and costly consolidation project. Large software vendors may simply be waiting for the dust to clear, for consolidation to happen on its own, or for one vendor to show a sign of leadership, success, and growth before stepping in and gobbling it up.

A Buy Philosophy

TeleCorp PCS is a good example of a new PCS carrier that has approached OSS with a buy-rather-than-build philosophy. The company’s service area will include Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Its strategy is to target specific local markets while offering national roaming capability enabled through a partnership agreement with AT&T Wireless.

“In most of these wireless applications the list of candidates is short,” says Gordon. As a result of the small number of vendors, TeleCorp had to accept the features that were commonly available. The company chose Lucent’s Activue provisioning product in the belief that because Lucent has a broad range of customers it will continue to enhance its product to meet the needs of the market. The company is content to wait for a new product release rather than build needed functionality, though it does have its own, small, internal IT shop to develop functions that are necessary but perhaps not slated for release in their vendors’ future products.

TeleCorp chose Lightbridge for much of its front office and fraud systems, LHS for billing, and Lucent again for provisioning, mediation and its network equipment. Looking at this list one sees that TeleCorp is taking few chances with its vendors. The carrier’s management team comes primarily from Sprint PCS/APC, with others from Bell Atlantic Mobile and other large mobile carriers. These people have built PCS carriers before and know the pitfalls. They were with Sprint PCS when it couldn’t bill its customers. Their strategy is to get all systems up and running smoothly before launch, rather than trying to fix things on the fly. As a result, they’ve stuck to a list of large, dependable vendors that could offer the support services they needed to meet their launch goals. In other words, they resigned themselves to a limited selection of products in exchange for peace of mind, partnering with vendors they knew would be there for the long haul and could be trusted to support business-critical functions.