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Table of Contents:
 Report from TeleManagement World Nice
Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks Join Forces to Develop Joint Network Management Platform
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Report from TeleManagement World Nice
By Ed Finegold
TeleManagement World Nice 2007 broke all previous attendance records and demonstrated the health of OSS/BSS markets in Europe and Asia. The conference continues to grow in step with the TeleManagement Forum’s increasing membership. The event typically benefits in attendance from its expanding technical programs, but this year’s show was clearly more business-oriented than in years past, as global telecoms seek the solutions that will help them to become application providers in both consumer and enterprise markets.
Major Themes
One of the major themes discussed throughout the event was the ongoing convergence of what were once separate IT and communications infrastructures. As services become increasingly IT-oriented, adoption of IT-world standards and practices, such as ITIL, is increasing in the telecom domain. This in turn is increasing the importance of OSS/BSS capabilities, particularly those that help to close the gap between network and application-based services.
Product and Service Assembly
Axiom Systems and BT, along with a number of other OSS/BSS vendors and national service providers, are driving an effort called the Product and Service Assembly Initiative. This initiative aims to drive pragmatic approaches to service and operational componentization as it relates to service creation and lifecycle management. The general idea is to define reusable components based on the capabilities of both IT and network systems. By drawing on these components, which are abstracted from underlying technologies and capital assets, BT and others believe they can reduce their time to market for new services by an order of magnitude or more.
Additionally, componentization would allow service providers to adopt multiple platforms that might otherwise be thought to overlap. For example, there are several IPTV platforms on the market from IT and Internet-world companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo!. According to Paul Robson, senior researcher for BT, these similar but distinct platforms can coexist in an operator’s environment because they may provide different classes of service for distinct customer groups.
Componentizing these platforms into reusable capabilities will mean that an operator can deliver multiple IPTV-oriented bundles in a way that conforms to specific customer desires or requirements. The same concept can be applied to any application service, be it consumer- or enterprise-oriented. This philosophy also appears to make room for multiple SDP platforms in the back office, each of which would have different strengths and weaknesses and could fulfill needs for very different market segments.
OSS Is Policy Management
As services become more componentized, reusable and real-time, policy management and execution become central to rapid deployment, personalization and user self-configuration. Telcordia’s Grant Lenahan argues that ultimately one logical architecture for policy management, real time charging, prepaid services, authentication and the like will become necessary.
Holding back the natural convergence of these domains, however, he says, are political and personal issues with carrier organizations. How carriers can “jump over” these remains unclear, though it is certain that personal egos must be set aside if a telecom provider wants to remain relevant in the coming years. The unfortunate side effect of protected fiefdoms is that massive technology programs are being driven to re-create services that already exist. Did telcos need to invent IPTV to become TV providers? Did they need to invent IMS to deliver SIP-based VoIP to enterprises? While these technologies appear to have long-term value, many question whether focusing on building out these domains today is really the most effective use of a telecom operator’s best technical and management talent.
Enterprise Needs Attention
With all of the focus on consumer services in the past couple of years, the enterprise market perhaps has not received the attention it deserves when it comes to operational and network transformation. The fact is that enterprises represent a significant majority of any major operators’ revenue base, and these customers are driving the demand for new application deployments. SIP, for example, is a ready technology that has yet to experience mass deployment, despite enterprises’ call for capabilities such as unified messaging and presence. SIP also paves the way for enterprises to leverage IMS capabilities. These great new technologies, however, continue to be held back by reactive service fulfillment processes that put the burden on enterprise customers to drive requirements and thus innovation.
Charlie Muirhead, president for Nexagent, an OSS/BSS player that is working to define this new, multi-disciplinary information and communications technology (ICT) domain, suggests that before the enterprise service creation and fulfillment problems can be solved, the industry debate relating to it needs to emerge so the problem can be better defined. He says that this is one of the “dirty little secrets” that no one seems very willing to discuss because of the weaknesses it can reveal in both telecom operators’ and enterprise IT players’ major revenue streams. The current problem, simply stated, is that enterprise service offerings are assembled on a highly customized and piecemeal basis. This approach simply isn’t sales-oriented or customer friendly. It fails to educate customers on what capabilities are available; fails to integrate the network, operations and IT domains in a way that can produce efficiencies and advanced services; and slows down the introduction of new technologies that enterprise customers want to buy.
IT Players and Bankers Are the 'New' New Telcos
An unspoken question—but a pervasive theme at the event—was whether it takes a non-telecom mind to revamp and transform the telecom industry. Goldman Sachs’ acquisition of Alltel earlier in the week certainly spurred this train of thought, as do increasing doubts that a majority of major telecoms really understand what it will take to win in the application services market. While BT appears to understand that distribution and transaction management will define the new telco realm, it is in fact companies like Accenture and EDS that are following suit.
These companies are accustomed to building logical networks on top of multiple providers’ physical networks for their enterprise customers, with value-added services and applications in turn built on top of them. They clearly see an opportunity to do this on a larger scale. As their telecom customers shy away from the price tags relating to major integration and transformation initiatives, these companies see potentially massive revenue streams in building out value-added supply and distribution chains, leaving traditional telcos who can’t transform to do what they’ve always done well: manage reliable and robust physical networks.
Service Assurance Is QoE
Network management capabilities that span the fault and performance domains have been available, from a technology perspective, for years. Over time, these have matured to drive capabilities such as real-time problem diagnosis and service impact analysis. Shachar Ebel, CTO for TTI Telecom, says that telecom providers are just beginning to turn the corner in integrating the once disparate fault and performance realms, thus taking steps to close the gap between what’s technically possible in service assurance and what’s actually used in practice. Driving this convergence is the recognition that quality of experience (QoE) is absolutely critical for customer adoption of everything from IPTV to SIP-based enterprise VoIP, thus giving the service assurance space the top- and bottom-line-oriented appeal it needs to become an area of focus and differentiation.
Representatives from Agilent Technologies added to Ebel’s perspective the fact that customers will become confused with so many new devices and services coming into play. Any IT veteran knows that “user error” is the leading cause of failure and user dissatisfaction with any new technology or service introduction. Service assurance tools become critical in helping to differentiate technology problems from user problems. Ultimately a customer representative should handle any user-generated problem—which will be blamed on the carrier—with a soft touch that turns a negative contact into a positive interaction.
Carrier-Wide Transformations Are Happening
Andrew Feinberg, president and founder of NetCracker, says that aggressive carriers are taking on transformation in grandiose ways because they recognize that big changes are needed in order to deliver the results investors and customers want to see. NetCracker alone announced major transformation program wins and added phases with UPC, Europe’s largest, multinational cable operator; Swisscom; Telus; and Sprint, in addition to its ongoing work with France Telecom. Non-telecom players are also jumping into the game, such as Dutch utility Trefor, for which NetCracker is building out telecom services capabilities.
NetCracker is working in parallel with players such as Amdocs, and Feinberg says that carriers are doing a better job of defining where these apparent competitors operate. Major vendors are being pushed to cooperate for the good of the carrier rather than competing in areas where their product portfolios might overlap. These telecoms won’t stand for the kind of all-out assimilation tactics some major vendors were guilty of in previous generations. NetCracker is benefiting from this discipline, as well as from the organic growth of its mature, Java-based solution set, which continues to incorporate customer-specific innovations as new productized feature sets.
TMF Moves Into Billing, Revenue Management, and Usage Analytics
Perhaps the biggest announcement at the event, and a significant sign that convergence and transformation are moving from theory to practical reality, was the news that both the Global Billing Association and IPDR.org have become programs within the TeleManagement Forum. These organizations have significant membership overlap and parallel activities that need to be synchronized. Each organization’s working groups will remain intact for now, but the groups aim to align their standardization and specification efforts.
Keith Willets, chairman and founder of the TeleManagement Forum, stressed the need for consistent standards in all of the touch points in the emerging telecom value chain. The forum, like its members, is extending its reach into entertainment, media and application services that bring user devices, billing, and usage measurement and analysis into focus.
Alex Leslie, director of strategy for the GBA, said that joining the Forum gives his organization “more firepower,” “reach” and resources that it did not necessarily have as a stand-alone organization. IPDR director Kelly Anderson said that the past 18 months have been IPDR’s most significant. The group’s detail record specification is now a part of CableLabs’ OCAP 1.1 standard for interactive television set-top middleware. It provides the basis for the usage monitoring agent that is critical to all of the new interactive advertising and real-time billing and charging capabilities that OCAP will enable on every cable set-top in North America and likely Europe as well. Time Warner, UPC and Cox—demonstrating their interest in leveraging the collective work of IPDR, GBA and TMF—are the first cable operators to become TeleManagement Forum members.
TMF has also moved into the revenue assurance domain, supporting a growing catalyst project in this area. This reflects growing interest and adoption of revenue assurance practices and solutions in Europe, Asia and South America, says Alon Aginsky, president and CEO for CVidya Networks, which leads the TMF revenue assurance program. He says the carriers in these markets aren’t as far along in terms of revenue management maturity, and that even those that have minimized leakage in their voice services offerings see significant “low-hanging fruit” in both data and content services, which he says suffer an average of roughly 12 and 20 percent leakage, respectively. Aginsky says his company received 20 RFPs for revenue assurance solutions in the first quarter of 2007 alone, almost entirely from Tier 1 carriers in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Every expert Billing World interviewed throughout the event agreed that these markets are extremely active for OSS/BSS, making the U.S. market appear stagnant by comparison.
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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