Billing & OSS World, Washington D.C. — Who will win out when it comes to the fairest operational and service enablement implementations in all the telecom land? We’ll find out on Wednesday, June 9, during the evening’s B/OSS Excellence Awards ceremony.
Telcordia and Comverse go head-to-head for the cost-management title, in just one of many vendor battle royales. But even service providers are in on the act: Verizon Communications Inc. takes on Alliance and RiverRockin the final round for business process automation, while Sprint-Nextel Corp. aims to beat out both MetraTech and ANDA Networks when it comes to the coveted title of “B/OSS Innovator of the Year.”
The awards will be presented Wednesday, at 6:15 p.m., at a special presentation during the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in Washington D.C.
When it comes to the aforementioned cost-management award, Comverse hopes to snag the nod with an implementation of its BSS solution for GCI. The idea was to make the integrated communications provider more competitive while converging systems for multiple technologies to save it money. The implementation paved the way for it to launch its own BSS/OSS company, Cycle 30.
Telcordia's submission had multiple examples of deployments for various service provider types over a number of years, demonstrating repeatability and the time-tested aspect of its cost-management software.
Meanwhile, Redknee and Tech Mahindra are vying for the Best Service Enablement Implementation award. Tech Mahindra’s submission describes the impressive and rapid time-to-market for a greenfield operator in Saudi Arabia. Redknee’s implementation involved an existing Western European operator, which launched a new handset and went on to connect 500,000 new customers within a few months, boosting its data average revenue per user by 9.2 percent.
Best Customer Experience Improvement is also up for grabs; Canadian operator TELUS, Sterling Commerce and MetraTech are the finalists. Telus showed off a new ability to reduce customer hold times and do a faster, more accurate job of getting answers for them, harnessing the real power of data analytics to improve the customer experience. Cengage with Sterling showed how it is tackling issues of subscriber management that impact both the customer experience as well as revenue; and MetraTech’s story gives a helpful look at business applications. Its MetraNet product allows processes, workflows, data models or interface mechanisms to be configured on a dynamic business modeling basis, so services can be easily created, be added to, or can replace an existing set of services.
The Best Business Process Automation award brings Verizon, RiverRock and Alliance into competition. Verizon’s submission showcases its effort to work more effectively with its enterprise customers as they evolve their use of communication. The idea is to improve the automation and leverage a portal strategy in keeping customers informed and making use of the data from the operator’s operations for innovation and business efficiencies.
