Telus Puts Software on Par With Network Transformation

So Gedeon and company took another look at their new network and said the second most important two little words: “What’s next?”

The answer was much the same as it was on the technology side: don’t spend a lot of time and money trying to automate the legacy stuff. So much more quietly than it had with its IP transformation, Telus began anew this time on the software side of the house. It contracted with Telcordia Technologies Inc., Syndesis (now Subex), NetCracker Technology Corp. and other OSS vendors back in 2005. It began asking more of Amdocs, its billing vendor. When, or if, it became an official OSS transformation is debatable. Ed Finegold, then editor of Billing World & OSS Today in September of 2006 called it that. Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy at NetCracker called it that. But the guy Telus brought in with its Clearnet acquisition and put in position to be Gedeon’s counterpart on the IT side — the guy with “transformation” in his title — didn’t call it that. Kevin Salvadori, executive vice president of business transformation and CIO, just called it accelerated change.

And one of the brightest examples of change, Gedeon said, was how these groups, IT and network, came together to lead this change.

“We have done proactive things at Telus around the sharing of resources and responsibilities and that has worked fantastic for us,” Gedeon said. “In a lot of places, there is a clear demark between the network and the BSS/OSS. Not here.”

The company instead created a single architecture team to address the integration of next-generation OSS with its next-generation IP network. “As you look into the future, there are a lot of grey areas there, so we thought a single architecture team would work best,” he said. “That old world doesn’t exist any more. You can’t have the massive struggle over who does what. You either move forward or you don’t.”

Telus, as is still often the case with other carriers, just didn’t see IT and billing as a critical part of the network. Then things started to change for Telus as facilities-based services began requiring automated provisioning and applications like VoIP began riding atop the network. “That took OSS to a new level. It wasn’t just about managing network elements, it was about managing services,” Gedeon said.

Telus began looking more closely at software standards such as those coming out of the TM Forum, most of which resonated with the company. “I just wish they were easier to implement,” Gedeon said.

In theory, he likes the way the forum’s frameworks remove the separation between BSS and OSS, though as product companies selling solutions, its members don’t always present them that way, he said. Telus has gotten more involved with activities at the forum, participating in the organization’s catalyst projects and contributing to its work on the Service Delivery Framework. It also has worked with partners such as Lucent and Oracle on developing a service delivery platform, which it first applied to its wireless business. For wireline services, the company determined it needed an abstraction layer and built a network gateway that hides the legacy wireline network from new next-gen systems. It also built a broadband policy engine that gave it pre-IMS capabilities.

But standards are something Telus has not always been willing to wait for. That extends to everything from application interfaces to the IMS standard. Pragmatism is the rule, but sometimes you have to move on.