Transverse is at a crossroads — literally and figuratively — as it launches this week its open source Business Logic Executive Environment and Platform known as blee(p).
On the literal side, one of the company’s two cornerstone customers is a startup mobile player named, of course, Crossroads Wireless. On the figurative side, Transverse is stepping into a BSS/OSS market where incumbent vendors already have wrapped carriers in kudzu-like embraces with layers of software and hardware upgrades. Extricating back-office operations and putting in new solutions is a tough chore for a company with a completely new model. Still, insisted Chris Couch, COO at Transverse, the back-office environment needs to change and Transverse is the company that can change it.
“Every so often with software, a new entrant has to come into the market in order to refresh the technology base because legacy vendors are not incented to just stop on a current platform and start over,” Couch said. “We see the market as [being] at the beginning of a fourth evolution of telco back-office infrastructure.”
Evolutions one through three brought the telco back office to where it is today: a joint littered with hardware silos and patchwork software quilts laid into place by vendors scrambling to quick-patch carrier demands for new applications and services. To reach this point, incumbent vendors acquired and merged and built layers upon original platforms, effectively tying up their customers with proprietary one-vendor solutions but, Couch said, leaving the window open for a fresh new approach.
The new approach still supports some old, but perennial, needs. It includes billing, customer care, order management, service management, real-time service delivery (not so old), on-device portal and call management. All these are based on Transverse’s open source, back-office infrastructure.
This open source software model supports Transverse’s premise that the end customer may indeed be the end user, but is not necessarily the one paying the carrier’s bills. Revenue just as likely could be coming from advertisers or the application provider.
“We call this Customer Asset Management (CAM). A carrier shifts its thinking from the subscribers as a primary revenue resource to subscribers being an asset on the same level as the network, then using those assets to generate other revenue streams,” Couch said.
According to Transverse, subscribers resist carrier add-on costs but still want new services. Applications providers can fill those needs with models that don’t necessarily cost the subscribers any money. It is they who pay carriers for the rights to access their end users.
“Just because a subscriber selects to use a service doesn’t mean they pay for the service; it could be a multitude of other people,” Couch said. “Today we see lots of partners in the mix trying to sell more to a subscriber and everybody participates in the revenue chain.”
