Wanted: Permanent Product Catalog for Telecom World

The telecom industry didn’t exist in the century of steam and locomotives, yet Emerson correctly foresaw the fate of all technological progress: “permanent” is merely a temporary calm before the next storm.

And it’s not just telecom that’s impermanent these days. With pain, we’ve recently learned that bankers, the experts of financial risk-taking, are having trouble balancing their checkbooks.

Fortunately, the biggest obstacles telecom faces are not external, but ones we brought on ourselves: we’re an industry that refuses to stand still and we seem to get our kicks from shattering yesterday’s business models.

And because we’ve opted for such dramatic technological and business changes, our billing and OSS walls are cracking all around us.

We built those billing/OSS walls to withstand the threats of ATM/frame relay faults and billing cycle deadlines and they’ve fulfilled that mission. Trouble is, the industry inside those walls is completely different than it was 20 years ago.

Telecom no longer obeys simple mathematical laws like: “If I invest $500 million in voice mail systems in Region X, I get a Y percent return in Z years.” And the chief reason the math no longer works is that we’ve collided with other industries — cable, Internet, computing and consumer electronics. In a wobbly world like that, it’s tough to tell whether you’ve invested in a big-time winner or sub-prime loser.

So what’s the best OSS/BSS strategy? Clearly, telecoms need to hedge their bets and build billing/OSS systems flexible enough to accommodate the hottest new services, be they business VoIP, Blackberry e-mail, real-time billing and charging, or the next big thing.

Easier said than done: exactly how do you architect new IP and real-time infrastructures and hold the old network and batch processing structures together with Superglue?

“Product catalog” is the industry buzzword that speaks to this need for wisely combining and condensing old and new billing/OSS systems.

And like its buzzword predecessors “IMS” and “3G,” “product catalog” owes much of its charm to its mysterious nature. Both billing and OSS suppliers can claim the product catalog as their own, yet neither has been forced to describe it in much detail.