Telus Puts Software on Par With Network Transformation

Rarely is a chief technology officer such a proponent of business and operations support systems. After all, technology is a CTO’s middle name. Gear and transport technologies fill their dreams. But this CTO, Ibrahim Gedeon of Telus — the second largest service provider in Canada — has long been an evangelist for BSS and OSS. It is unclear when the spirit of the back office took hold, but it may have been when his company completed one of the most ambitious and industry-leading transitions to IP in the industry, only to be left asking the question made famous by Miss Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?”

Being an evangelist, however, does not make Gedeon a software fan. He knows BSS and OSS solutions do not always live up to their hype. He knows that what passes for standards in this space can be long on idealism and short on realism. He knows that it’s a competitive marketplace where a vendor’s view of end-to-end begins and ends at different places than they do in his view. But Gedeon now is convinced of the equal importance of a proper back-office infrastructure, and with two simple words has re-enforced that point to the industry. Those two words? We’ll get to that.

CTOs aren’t the only ones focused on hardware and network technology standards. Most of the industry press is as well. Who can blame them? Telus often makes headlines as it did back at the turn of the millennium when it announced its intention to build an all-IP network and throw legacy infrastructure to the wind. It made headlines along the way as it reached milestones and became the first carrier to put its mobile network on an IP MPLS backbone and deployed the first standards-based IP MPLS network (emphasis on the “standards-based” as Telecom Italia may have been first overall.)

Telus also made headlines with each acquisition, from the PSINet and Clearnet Communications deals back in 2001 to the more recent (and smaller) acquisitions of companies such as Fastvibe, Emergis and Assurent Secure Technologies. Telus continues to make headlines today with its wireless technology decisions — and indecisions.

Last month, whatever lingering indecision there may have been regarding its wireless future disappeared. Telus grabbed the headlines again with its decision to join Bell Canada in both committing to the GSM 4G standard Long Term Evolution (LTE) and building a joint High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) overlay to their existing DMA EV-DO networks.

The transition to IP and the leap into 4G wireless are significant architectural investments and transformations. They’re expensive and leading-edge. But are they enough by themselves to make Telus, or any other service provider, the competitive, profitable companies they need to be?

Those Two Little Words

Hardly. As it turns out that was just the beginning, and according to Gedeon, it may even have been the easy part.

“We set out to transform the network and we did it. We put next-generation technology in place and it was fantastic,” Gedeon said. Then he uttered those two little words that all BSS and OSS companies long to hear, words that establish the back office on the same high plane as the network, that tell a decades-old story in two syllables. Gedeon said, “So what.”

He said the IP network was supposed to make Telus’ life easier. It hasn’t.

“Everything was IP, but we weren’t getting the savings we were supposed to get, so we thought ‘What is happening here?’” Gedeon said. “It hit us that it’s so easy to introduce new technology and overcome the challenges, but if your new IP network is not using next-generation processes, then you haven’t realized the benefits of your investment.”