Telus Puts Software on Par With Network Transformation

So Telus looks for standards-based and open systems, which it thinks it found in Sigma Systems, which announced the completion of its service management platform at Telus in May of last year. Sigma’s SMP automates service provisioning and activation, service authorization and resource management for complex services on a multitechnology and multivendor service delivery network.

Telus’ Salvadori said Sigma's OSS solution provides an elegant framework for delivering the latest premium wireless content over 3G wireless data networks. Now it better hope it can do the same for 4G.

Brian Cappelani, CTO at Sigma Systems, was appointed as an advisory director this spring to the TM Forum’s board of directors. He said the TM Forum is instrumental in shaping the standards of the global communications industry. He now serves on that board and shares the vision of Ibrahim Gedeon, who also became a board member.

Telus also is expanding its relationship with Amdocs. In September, the companies said they had completed the conversion of customers in British Columbia to Amdocs’ billing system and customer experience system. At least partly in jest, Gedeon said, people around there said they spent too much money on Amdocs. “But that’s not really the case. We have great bills, but its more about getting the workflow so I can get the five guys together I need to support an application and make sure the integrity is there. That way we don’t troubleshoot an application when there’s a network problem and vice versa.”

Integrity and service assurance is one place Telus will look to invest more in the future, especially as its capabilities extend beyond the traditional customer endpoint. “As we abstract the network, we also abstract the CPE and in two years that will be a big thing,” he said.

It may be too early to tell, but the company doesn’t anticipate the financial shenanigans going on south of its border — that’s us — to curtail its BSS/OSS investment. He said lots of companies survived the dot-com era and are fine today. He hopes it won’t be any worse than that.

Gedeon is more concerned with the current capabilities of his vendors than he is about the financial crisis. He wants a real-time rating and charging solution; he hasn’t seen one that’s ready. And the standards for it are lukewarm, he said. “We’re down to two or three vendors there and none of them are fully compliant with the standard.”

This may be another case where Telus just has to move ahead. Dan Baker, research director of Dittberner's OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase, said in a recent report that billing and charging would grow into a $7.6 billion market by 2012. Telus is just looking for someone to earn a piece of that.

Policy and control also is important and needs to be improved, he’s not sure his vendors are ready. Ultimately, Gedeon would like to see the BSS/OSS architecture boil down to this: one customer management system, one service management system and one resource management system. “To me, that’s the cornerstone of what we are trying to do at Telus,” Gedeon said.

If the latter is to work, it may be up to NetCracker, which was brought in to provide an inventory solution for enterprise customers on Telus’ MPLS network, to make it happen. Perhaps that is why Gedeon said he is happy NetCracker now has a sugardaddy in NEC (NEC acquired NetCracker this summer for approximately $300 million.)

When he wrote a contributing article for B/OSS in early 2007, NetCracker’s Mewada, said triple-play services are highly complex to deploy, provision and support, as many telcos have discovered. That’s true. He also said, “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.”

However true this may be, it is a path Telus was able to follow only after developing its network gateway and was able to abstract the legacy network.

At the time, Mewada said Telus was 18 months into a five-year program to transform back-office systems and OSS processes. We are now closer to the end — 40 months into it with 20 to go. It has become apparent to everyone that putting a timetable on a project like this is as arbitrary as putting one on a war. There is no end to the effort.