Economy Highlights Asian OSS/BSS Conference

A two-day OSS/BSS summit featuring senior members of the Asia Pacific telecom industry has wrapped up in Singapore. It was the third annual event hosted by Frost & Sullivan.

Manoj Menon, partner and managing director for Asia Pacific at Frost & Sullivan, opened the two-day summit with a welcome address followed by a keynote speech by Jim Peters, chief architect, service fulfilment and workflow platform of BT Design. Peters shared BT's success story on becoming more customer-centric by deploying capabilities that helped them address their customers’ business needs.

Strategy to succeed in the current economic climate was the underlying theme of presentations and panel discussions at the summit. Service providers are looking at their vendors to OSS/BSS support and solutions that make the most of what they have. Although large transformation efforts continue, there are many more smaller efforts to quickly reduce operations' expenditures and squeeze more value out of existing infrastructure investments.

Senior consulting analyst from Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan, Karl Whitelock, presented market insights on the current trends in OSS/BSS and shared the results of a joint survey conducted by official media partner Telecom Asia and Stratecast.

"The survey results clearly show that CSPs are focused on service quality, implementing improvements in network capabilities and timely support of new services. In accomplishing this focus, the major OSS/BSS functions presently receiving the most attention include customer self care, customer experience management, revenue assurance and business analytics," said Karl.

Topics such as transforming to customer centricity, understanding and assuring the customer experience; and the what-why-how of customer experience management were covered through a variety of interactive case studies and panel discussions over the two days.