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Amdocs Survey Finds That Inadequate OSS Impacts Time to Market
Amdocs released results of a global survey on trends and issues associated with OSS transformation and the delivery of new services. Based on the responses of 100 executives from wireline and wireless service providers, the independent survey concluded that many providers are hindered by the current capabilities of their existing systems.
The survey revealed that service providers currently face significant operational challenges when attempting to roll out new services such as VPNs, IPTV and VoIP. 'Of these services, IPTVÑwhich requires both physical premises changes, as well as OSS systems changesÑtends to be the most difficult to roll out,' says Seth Nesbitt, vice president of marketing for Amdocs Cramer division. 'IPTV touches all aspects of a service provider's business, the customer-facing systems, set-top boxes, back-office systems, and then physically getting new capacity to the network.'
The systems to support IPTV and other complex new services are struggling to keep up; 77 percent of service providers stated that legacy systems are unsuitable for meeting the needs of today's customers, and that these systems are not equipped to quickly introduce new services. Additionally, the cost of introducing new services is increasing; only 38 percent of companies surveyed report a decline in the cost of new service introductions.
'Many of these services are increasingly complex; what we are talking about is adding capability on top of capacity. So now we are looking at delivering a bundle of services that have to all be delivered at roughly the same time in a coherent fashion, and customer expectations are also higher,' says Nesbitt. 'Weeks to deliver a high-speed service is no longer acceptable, and the players are competing heavily to get these services out in shorter and shorter times. When you combine more complex services and more features, on top of a quicker demand cycle, it becomes that much more of a challenge, which then causes costs to increase.'
Other problems include the lack of visibility into business processes and systems, the shortfalls of legacy systems and data management issues. These factors are aggravating costs, fallout rates and time to market.
According to Nesbitt, lack of visibility is a real problem. 'Traditionally OSS and BSS has been segmented, from a systems perspective and an organization perspective. So, for example, as a consumer if you have ordered DSL, or a bundle, and you call up about the status of your order, once it is passed out of the BSS system, traditionally it is very difficult to see where in the in the fulfillment process it is exactly. Those OSS systems are separate. They are not accessible to the people in the BSS environment, even within the OSS itself. Once an order is decomposed and waiting for provisioning, or waiting for activation, it is very difficult to get visibility.'
Nesbitt also points to assurance issues as problematic. 'Most service providers have difficulties determining which services and which customers are being affected when a network fault occurs,' he says. 'Fault correlation is still extremely difficult, especially when you have a fragmented OSS. It is the fragmentation and this lack of visibility across OSS/BSS about networks, customers and services that causes these problems.'
Speed to Market
The survey concluded that rapid introduction of new services is a key challenge for service providers now and will continue to be over the next two years. Despite the fact that most service providers ranked reducing time to market as a high priority, only 34 percent of them can introduce new services in less than six months, with most introductions ranging from six to 18 months.
'Due to the complexity, it is taking longer to introduce these new services,' Nesbitt says. 'It could be a situation where the provider has to change their business model, or form relationships with many content providers, understand royalty payments, and so forth.' So while many products out on the market have been touting speed to market for quite some time, the increase in service complexity is mitigating the product improvements.
Fallout continues to impact margins. It occurs when an exception in the service fulfillment process needs to be processed manually. This can ultimately result in increased costs. Only 18 percent of respondents said that fallout rates were decreasing; 82 percent stated that fallout rates are not moving or are increasing.
Fallout rates are increasing for several reasons, says Nesbitt. 'Part of it is that many of these services are new, so efforts might be manual. Any time orders are manually processed, fallout rates are higher.' He adds that fallout is also related to, again, complexity. 'A bundled service by its very nature has much more opportunity for things to go wrong. And then there are third parties for content, where there is even more that can go wrong,' he says.
The survey also probed data accuracy and a single view of the network, service and customer. Seventy-three percent of respondents stated that data is insufficiently available to roll out new services; 56 percent stated that inaccuracy of data is an impediment to rolling out new services. Additionally, more than 70 percent of respondents said that a single view of the network, service and customer is a key requirement for OSS.
The survey revealed that the No. 1 OSS requirement over the next two years will be integration of OSS and BSS. Finally, although more than 70 percent of respondents agree that OSS transformation is essential for new service introduction, only 38 percent said that OSS transformation is always associated with new service introduction.
The survey (independently conducted in January by Coleman Parkes Research) queried OSS directors, CTOs and CIOs from major wireline and wireless providers in the Americas, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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