A leading telco in Canada, TELUS is now more than 18 months into a five-year program to transform its back-office systems and OSS processes. In 2005, the company had merged its mobile and wireline arms to reduce costs and to support future plans for converged fixed-mobile services.
TELUS had to change its architecture because it realized it did not have the visibility it needed across data stores and processes. Thorough analysis showed that it would be more expensive to integrate next-generation OSS elements and keep the basic OSS architecture intact than to retire old systems gradually and replace them with an integrated approach to customer and service management. TELUS then chose NetCracker Technology for the inventory and provisioning components of its next-generation systems infrastructure.
Making Way for Triple Play
TELUS was driving to deploy triple-play services including voice, DSL broadband and IPTV in the residential market, which meant rethinking its support systems and processes. “To cope with the dramatic rise of new and converging services it was apparent that we needed a more sophisticated system,” says Arthur J. Musgrove, director of network operations systems for TELUS. “We realized that our … systems were preventing us from being able to deliver that information.”
Triple play is highly complex to deploy, provision and support, as many telcos have already discovered. Without efficient provisioning and assurance it can be difficult to operate complex, low-margin services profitably. “We have people on our executive team who had come from the wireless sector,” says Musgrove. “In that space there is an expectation of up-to-the-minute internal information. What you want is an end-to-end view of the processes in real time.”
Leaving Legacy Systems Behind
Part of TELUS’ replacement approach involved engaging NetCracker for its inventory and fulfillment systems. These applications will replace the legacy fulfillment systems and integrate with service activation, network management and billing applications.
During its systems migration, TELUS found that making an inventory of its access network was extremely expensive. This is a common problem with legacy copper networks for all incumbent telcos, where typically decades of inadequate paper record keeping for installations, changes and repairs have resulted in inaccurate records for access networks. TELUS decided that because reconciling its existing database would be difficult and expensive, a clean inventory approach was the right choice.
A variety of inventory systems will be progressively integrated and retired and transferred to NetCracker’s solution. “Inventory has to be the core element,” Musgrove points out. “If you know what you’ve got and where it is, you are a long way towards getting where you need to go.”
Mitigating Risk
TELUS will be using NetCracker software in both its enterprise and mass market businesses as it introduces new, advanced services, such as advanced Layer 3 services like MPLS and VPLS on the enterprise side, and triple or n-play on the mass market side. The NetCracker architecture involves one central database handling everything with different processing “instances” developed for different services.
TELUS is migrating contiguous sets of inventory and processes so as to ensure integrity and continuity of both the data and the business. It is converting one system at a time, allowing it to mitigate risk. Taking an iterative approach to a large transformation is helping to deliver some early benefits to customers, but also manages the risks associated with such a large-scale program.
The business transformation began in 2005, and the “foundational” work for the new architecture was completed in mid-2006. The heavy lifting is expected to take place during the next 18 to 24 months. The final stage of the program will involve retiring smaller, outlying systems and enabling higher service delivery potential based on the new, unified inventory. To date, IP networks have had the inventory application applied, so that some processes have been brought down from a half hour to five minutes, Musgrove says.
Matching Technology to Process
Instead of installing technology first and designing processes to control it, TELUS has developed a forward-looking set of processes and is bending the technology to work with them. TELUS uses Java technology as a strategic standard, which made NetCracker’s J2EE-based products suitable.
The NetCracker framework provides an underpinning that is designed to allow all of the components to share the same information, unify security and enable seamless business process flows. “The key is our focus on our inventory systems,” says Musgrove. “We are rapidly moving toward a single view of the customer for a growing list of products, from the service representation right down to the physical network. The single view has huge benefits, but is still relatively rare in the communications industry.”
Ultimately, developing the service layer through its OSS transformation will help the company migrate to its next-generation network. Musgrove points out that unlike previous technology revolutions in telecom, where the network changes came first and the support systems tried to catch up, this time around the service layer is paving the way for eventual replacement of legacy with next-generation infrastructure. The goal is that customers will not even notice the switch because modern OSS systems will enable a seamless transition.
Sanjay Mewada is Vice President of Strategy at Netcracker Technology. He can be reached at sanjay.mewada@netcracker.com.
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