OSS Integration: Stepping Stone to Flow-Through Provisioning

Despite the many challenges, a handful of service providers are beginning to offer customized, packet-based, on-demand services, even though OSS and billing vendors, systems integrators and equipment manufacturers are still in the throes of figuring it all out.

Whether CLECs connect to ILECs or bigger broadband providers, they all must automate and integrate order management, provisioning, activation and billing to reach the ultimate goal of flow-through provisioning.

However, provisioning, activating and billing for SLA-based services such as voice over IP (VoIP), video on demand and interactive TV is impossible with today’s manually driven processes. As evidenced by the number of CLECs going belly-up, launching new services is no easy task, as most companies haven’t been able to recoup their costs for launching new services.

In addition to being manual, today’s provisioning, order management, activation, rating, and billing are disjointed—each with different data sources and different customer views. OSS interfaces are disparate with manual entry; billing is still an afterthought; and while activation is partially automated, most point solutions offer little if any integration.

For service providers to procure a business model where revenue and cost lines cross for profitability, there needs to be synchronization of product and service catalogs, creation of common databases, and revenue and service assurance capabilities that deliver on SLA and QoS promises.

At first glance, it appears Tier 1 carriers are in the most difficult position, as they have very complex environments with rapidly changing business models. With so much M&A activity, large carriers are struggling to gain a consolidated view of their network inventory. The smaller players, however, lack the resources or influence of the bigger players.

Building the Customer Master

Global Crossing, for one, is making automation one of its key initiatives for its MPLS-based and IPSec VPNs. “It will be a key competitive advantage and differentiator if we reduce provision times, increase billing accuracy and reduce error rates on provisioning and provide service level agreement tracking and reporting tools,” says Peter Brown, director of IP OSS at Global Crossing. The company is working toward consolidating its inventory so that it can have one standardized global OSS platform with one customer master and product catalog to eliminate the need for distinct, separate systems, as well as one customer master eCRM system to replace individual billing systems.

In its customer master, the organization will make all pertinent data—including location and contact information, as well as more granular data about links to contracts outlining customer subscriptions and payments—available for viewing by sales reps and CSRs through uCommand, a Web-based tool developed for viewing the unified customer master and product catalogs. For synchronization among product catalogs, each billing system will have its own billing master.

Once it has complete and synchronized product catalogs, Global Crossing’s sales force will have access to sales, provisioning and activation elements, for real-time pricing and configuration control. “That puts product catalogs into salespersons’ hands. You need to provide it as far up in the process as possible, which is sales,” Brown says, noting that most of the time, product catalogs are handled after provisioning or orders are taken. “It usually involves numerous manual steps, which greatly increases inaccuracies.”

In order to have one customer master eCRM format, the company is working with systems integrator Accenture to integrate OSS and order management. Global Crossing also works with Granite Systems for inventory management and Clarify for its eCRM component.

The organization currently is in the midst of migrating all customer information not relevant to invoices to eCRM. “Billing can no longer own all the customer information; instead, it will be used only for creation of invoices for rated products,” Brown says. “In DSL, for example, you need distance-sensitive data, which is not going to be found in a billing product and service catalog.” After taking the customer master out of billing, the next step involves linking sales and customer service to eCRM forms. One dip into one location is the goal—one central place for both customer care and network operations to view all aspects of customer configurations. That way, when trouble tickets or billing resolution issues come up, customer care centers will have access to the inventory system, customer information on the master, and the customer profile information database. “This will eliminate the need to pull up multiple screens to view different areas.” Brown says Global Crossing wants carriers to order new services, change existing services, open up trouble tickets and monitor communications among networks through its Web-based tools. “All our projects on the OSS side are based on ROI to internal customers,” he says.

The company also is building an order management system for bonding with trading partners in such areas as DSL. “Sometimes we manage equipment for other carriers, so even if we don’t have all the elements in our network, we will have flow-through provisioning through our partners,” Brown says. Global Crossing also is building interfaces from its global management systems to its partners to reduce manual steps. “We are providing APIs of our process structures directly to our partners so that we eliminate faxing and email,” he says.

Preintegrated Systems Key for Midsize Players

Like Global Crossing, Netifice Communications is supporting its IP VPN services with several automation initiatives.

The company’s IT organization is building a front-end CRM architecture based on a consolidated and synchronized product catalog and customer catalog. Through a mix of proprietary and preintegrated products, the company in four months has realized a 10 percent to 15 percent improvement in recurring and usage-based revenues, as well as a 100 percent accuracy rate in customer billing information.

While its goal of integrating customer care, order management, provisioning, billing and its network elements is similar to that of Global Crossing, Netifice’s IT organization doesn’t have the luxury of choosing best-of-breed systems and integration through the larger SIs.

“It’s hard to focus on complete end-to-end solutions, when your network and resulting products are a constantly moving target,” says CIO Eric Nelson. Netifice, like many emerging telcos, is focusing its spending on developing and implementing new products, rather than on high OSS systems integration and maintenance costs. “Most of our decisions are driven by what we have available to spend,” he notes. “As a CIO in an emerging telco, I have to focus on predicting what our business is going to be, and at the same time executing a plan for an OSS infrastructure that supports what we are today.”

For that reason, Netifice, like many of the other emerging players, looked for a highly malleable yet relatively inexpensive OSS system. “We wanted an operational support architecture that would allow for application extension and tight integration between back- and front-office systems,” Nelson notes, “as well as customer self-service and preintegrated customer care, order management and billing.”

Netifice chose Telution’s Communication Exchange (COMX), an integrated suite of customer care, order management and billing applications for voice, video and data service providers. Nelson says Telution’s Web-based system enables CSRs to configure and obtain quotes prior to sending orders to provisioning, which leverages attribute-based pricing. “The process used to be manual,” he says, “but now they can view account profiles, order status, billing and trouble tickets online.” He adds that customers can view bills online, and ultimately will use the application for self-care.

One of the advantages of choosing a preintegrated system is synchronization of product catalogs and elimination of multiple repositories of customer information. “We can’t afford to have islands of unsynchronized information like most of the ILECs,” notes Nelson.

Prior to implementing Telution’s product, functional department coordination was becoming difficult for Netifice because the company was manually generating customer bills. “We try to customize to each customer, which leads to many combinations of elements to implement, and for each iteration it is possible to get a completely different set of inputs,” Nelson says, noting that what the customer considers to be one product could really look like 50 different products once it hit the back office.

To effectively bring to market everything from network equipment elements to customer-facing software, Nelson ultimately has to integrate Netifice’s eCRM customer-facing front end with Telution’s back-office system and the network-facing systems. “The customer-facing product catalog has to be simple enough for customers to understand,” he explains. Since Netifice’s CRM has replaced the invoice as the primary contact with his customers, Nelson believes his customer-facing software is one of Netifice’s competitive differentiators. Because he couldn’t find an end-to-end system that interfaced with customers the way he wanted, Nelson and Netifice’s IT organization built SmartWorX—a uniform user platform, which provides secure access for Netifice’s value-added services and support applications.

As a customer-facing and supply chain management environment, SmartWorX acts as a turnkey connectivity portal. It offers prequalification, order status and performance reporting, billing and the ordering of access options, which Nelson claims leads to reduced customer churn, more efficient network monitoring, faster repair time and improved fault management.

While the path for integration and development has been smooth, Nelson concedes smaller service providers have to be prepared to make trade-offs when going with preintegrated systems. “A pre-integrated solution will cost less than a software suite because the application integration is built-in, but you have to balance reduced feature functionality against the pre-integration savings. In pre-integrated solutions, for example, you have the advantage of the same product catalog for provisioning, billing, order entry and order management, but you need to strike a balance between deep functionality needs and reduced systems integration costs—and that is a significant implementation challenge.”

Nelson also cautions companies to be wary of preintegration claims. He notes that during his OSS selection process, he encountered many companies that claimed they had pre-integrated systems that were really no more than applications joined together through acquisitions and cobbled together via proprietary interfaces. In fact, most experts agree that current vendor claims to have “hooks” to other applications should be closely examined.

Up Close

As a response to the need for integration, most if not all billing and OSS vendors are rushing to write APIs to partners’ systems. However, written APIs don’t eliminate the need to write large amounts of code when trying to keep OSS and billing up to date and in synch. There’s often more integration work involved than vendors are apt to say.

Therefore, a company buying best-of-breed products should make sure they carry predefined support for integration; otherwise, it becomes a never-ending SI project.

Accenture

“Everyone claims to have APIs written to each other’s software, but I see plenty of vendors teaming together in marketing agreements, but failing to remain on the same code line,” says Dale Raaen, communications and global CRM leader in Accenture’s CRM and billing unit. “One vendor may keep up with updates to fields or adhere to changing standards quicker than its partners, so remaining in synch is a real challenge.”

Accenture currently is in production with a client using its Integration Hub, which integrates Siebel, Portal and MetaSolv components, with Vitria “providing the glue” for process flow and meta-models of mapped data. The consultancy went live in June with Globo Cabo in Brazil, which offers cable networks used for broadband services to more than 1 million customers. “We take business events and provide transformation rules, data validation and workflow management,” says Raaen.

He warns, however, that service providers should not look to EAI vendors as a cure-all. “Many of our clients look at using enterprise application integration systems [EAI] to pull systems together; they rely on technology as an answer in and of itself, rather than have systems engineers drive information flows to get the right level of automation.”

Telcordia

“Sometimes, service providers rely too much on the fact that an interface exists, only to find their systems can’t handle data coming from another system. They can’t apply functionality to it; they can just push it,” says Paul Minkin, executive director of rapid system integration at Telcordia. The company is working to integrate order management, inventory management, service provisioning, trouble ticket management and workflow management. “Rather than look at EAI as something to bring you all the way, providers should look at it as a good start,” says Minkin. “The problem we see is that of generic interfaces. Some vendors have APIs to EAI buses out of the box, but many times adopters and connecters don’t have enough of the data to accomplish the right business flow.”

He also adds that point products often become “show stoppers” in terms of skyrocketing integration costs. “Point-to-point interfaces for one activity are not sufficient when you need the whole process of order-to-cash flow,” Minkin says. “Sometimes you can automate one function, and then have manual activities driving up costs and errors.”

In an attempt to address end-to-end flow-through for service activation and assurance, and other inquiries related to billing, Telcordia is partnering with Daleen to provide TouchPoint—a service incorporating Daleen’s billing software into Telcordia’s suite that includes service delivery and order management. This system will integrate to other network management and service assurance systems.

Daleen

With its Care, Order, and Commerce platform, Daleen integrates customer care and billing with MetaSolv’s order management, inventory management, service provisioning, trouble management and workflow management. Through a series of APIs, customers can have a packaged product at a relatively low cost.

Daleen also is building APIs to support Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) in its Commerce Care products. “EJB and Java hold the best promise for having a set of components within enterprise infrastructure for integration,” says Frank Dickinson, senior vice president of product management at Daleen. “Besides that, you can put them on the Web easily and interoperate with many platforms, including CORBA, for customization.” Daleen participated in TMF’s Catalyst project for IP VPN. “Our care and order piece was the front end for network service providers, and our billing piece was used by the provider with the actual circuit,” adds Dickinson. In the project, Daleen took SLA and QoS information, and produced credits based on different network occurrences. “Vitria was used to deliver the SLA message to us, which prompted us to issue credits and send a notice to the customer through a Web portal,” Dickinson explains.

MetaSolv

MetaSolv works to integrate management of orders, inventory, trouble ticketing and workflow. It partners with key billing companies, such as Portal, Daleen and ADC; interconnect and gateway companies, like DSET, Quintessent and NightFire; and fault/assurance companies like Micromuse.

The company also places a high importance on synchronizing product catalogs. “A product catalog can be a hierarchical structure of bundles of items, and features and options on various items, as well as the relationship of those components to one another. All of those elements have to be in synch, as well as the pricing at a catalog level. Once a customer selects a service and usage is built up, dynamic updates have to exist among all elements so that discounts tie back to the product catalog,” says Dana Brown, vice president of marketing and cofounder of MetaSolv.


Cygent

“There are vendors out there who claim they’ve acquired technology that provides up to 90 percent of what providers need out of the box. That makes for a compelling speed-to-market case, but the problem is that those types of solutions are often niche solutions that work with only certain vendors’ equipment or to a specific service type, whether DSL, IP services or 3G mobile networks,” says Cygent’s David Hom, CTO and vice president of strategic development.

Cygent has partnered with Portal to pursue a prepackaged end-to-end system. “We already integrate with Portal to manage offers in their catalog,” claims Hom. “Through our technology, a person can enter in a new offer into Portal’s product catalog, which through XML is published into Cygent’s product catalog. We capture the order and all data required to provision it, and using our event service and XML messages, we send service activation messages to the Portal billing system.” Cygent also is partnering with MetaSolv to provide self-care capabilities to its platform.

Cygent also is integrating its Task Manager, a workflow component that routes messages, to its activation and billing partners. Currently, they are working with metropolitan fiber and long-haul bandwidth providers to ensure they can flow through where appropriate.

The organization also works with Sun Microsystems, major network manufacturers and Telcordia on OSS-J initiatives, a new industry process to define and implement Java-based APIs for OSS and BSS systems.

“The initiative is to get network equipment folks and service activation platforms to support a standard interface. Then any front end that is OSS-J compliant could flow through orders through service activation components,” Hom says.

Portal

Because Infranet is built on an object-oriented platform, the business logic is separated from data, says John Janetos, director of strategic alliances at Portal. “In other words, the implementation of the object and its data is separated from the use of the object.”

This separation of data and logic is key, according to Shay Mowlem, senior director of product marketing at Portal. “It allows us to maintain consistent APIs that don’t change from release to release.” That enables Portal to modify the implementation (the data representation) of the object, or add new functionality or behavior to an object, without modifying existing APIs.

Using Infranet, customers and partners can extend or place in a subclass existing objects that are already defined within Infranet, Janetos says. For example, if Infranet defines a basic “event” object from which other types of event objects can be derived, such extended events have unique attributes, but still inherit the existing event functionality. By extending objects and defining new functionality for the objects,” Janetos says, “Infranet provides the ability to extend its APIs through this new functionality.”

As for preintegration, Portal’s has integrated with tax and payment gateways, LDAP directories and VoIP gateways. In the OSS space, Micromuse and Portal have developed a Netcool adapter that integrates Netcool with Infranet to enhance billing with data for QoS and service assurance. Similarly, Portal has worked with provisioning and order management partners like MetaSolv and CEON to integrate Infranet with their platforms.

Telution

“More and more, IP, ATM and even fixed wireless providers are asking for order management and customer care, as well as a need to get closer to the network,” says John Konczal, vice president of product management at Telution. “Increasingly, these companies will be using customer information to drive provisioning, and network information to drive billing.”

Telution recently partnered with CoManage as an example of seamless integration. With CoManage, Telution has a record of all customers linked to certain network elements, and through a common service instance ID, both companies track information. “So, if a network element goes down, CoManage probes it and maps to the ID, at which point it can issue a trouble ticket to Telution. The customer is then notified by CSRs, who get the information through a Web-based call center application,” explains Konczal. “Once CoManage knows the network element is fixed and available, it automatically closes the trouble ticket in Telution, records the reason for the outage, and automatically applies a credit to the customer account.”

“As DSL and voice over DSL take off,” he says, “companies will look to that type of integration for provisioning transactions from order management through to network activation, such as CoManage’s ISM. Then, providers can have automatic, zero-touch provisioning of their DSLAM, voice gateway or ATM router. The order management application always has the latest status.” That process, Konczal claims, will replace the need for multiple applications for customer care, order management, trouble tickets, network and inventory management, and billing.

ADC

ADC is bringing together order management and provisioning by integrating CommTech’s FastFlow product for provisioning with ADC’s Singl.eView offering. “We are integrating so that our customers have a common desktop and a common view of the customer, as well as a common service and product catalog,” says Jim Hemmer, senior vice president and general manager of service fulfillment at ADC.

Hemmer claims ADC is in a unique position in that it owns many different pieces of OSS from a functional perspective, including billing and customer care, order management, and QoS and performance management.


Grasping the Process Flow

Regardless of whether they are creating preintegrated, off-the-shelf packages or best-of-breed end-to-end suites, these and most other OSS, billing, consulting and mediation companies are working diligently to meet market demands for automated, integrated systems. But rather than take a wait-and-see approach, service providers should work to define business requirements and business process flows in engineering strategies for order management and billing; network operations and provisioning, marketing and sales, customer care, service assurance, finance and human resources, trading partners and B2B gateways. Only then can they begin to build an architecture and OSS requirements, as well as come up with a data model and use cases.