Questions and Answers – And Big, Big Dollars

By Larry Lannon

Time for a BSS/OSS pop quiz: I am thinking of a subject, not just any subject. I am thinking of a subject unlike any other in that a single phrase answers the following three questions.

1. What subject is big, global and at the center of the interconnected issues facing the BSS/OSS community?
2. What subject has revenue – billions and billions of dollars of hard, cold revenue – attached to it and is growing quickly during bad economic times?
3. What subject is at the center of the BSS/OSS community’s strategic opportunities – and strategic vulnerabilities?

B/OSS is attacking the Service Assurance market with a multi-pronged information blitz beginning later next month. And, yes, the answer to the quiz is Service Assurance.

The global Service Assurance market is booming. Service Assurance will grow by $1.1 billion – or 48 percent – in the five-year period 2009-14. The Service Assurance market will be $3.4 billion in 2014, up from $2.3 billion in 2009 – a CAGR of 8.3 percent during a period of global economic disaster.

Think about the context for that CAGR for a second. In Europe, the recently booming economies of countries on the perimeter of Europe, Greece and Ireland, have busted flatter than a week old Guinness or last month’s dolmades. There may be more bad news for hard pressed European borrowers like the Iberian countries and for their nervous creditors to the north like Germany.

Or look on this side of the Atlantic. The U.S. is in its most prolonged economic slump since my parents were in diapers in Chicago and Al Capone was the biggest, baddest name in the Second City. That is a long, long time ago. More tough times are straight ahead here in the States, according to economic prognosticators of all creeds. No one gets a hall pass in this economy.

Yet Service Assurance is growing like it is 1999 and the U.S. has a surplus, not an enormous debt. Clearly, there is something fundamental about Service Assurance’s importance to the communications industry that begs for exploration in depth.

B/OSS is launching the Service Assurance Forum, Sept. 22-23, at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston. You can register at www.serviceassuranceforum.com. The Service Assurance Forum will be built around a request-for-information format, inviting respondents and sponsors to look at a common RFI developed by a fictitious but realistic carrier and explain how their strategy aligns with the RFI’s specs.

B/OSS also is doing market research around SA, creating a thematic Digital Issue and two Reports around the subject, and planning a series of three Service Assurance Webinars. Our goal is simple: Make as much comprehensive, in-depth information about Service Assurance available to the BSS/OSS community around this critical subject as quickly as possible. Why is Service Assurance so important? Why is it growing under these deleterious conditions? What happens if my company makes – or misses – the Service Assurance bus?

Join us in Boston this September. Don’t miss this bus.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO ’s Communications Network.