Bridging to the new world
Mobile Europe: John, perhaps many people would know Amdocs best for operating more on the BSS side of a business, with its customer relationship, billing and service solutions. What is it in your customer’s current business priorities that is driving that need for converged OSS/BSS solutions and processes?
John Lee: In the past, one of the things that was allowed to happen within operators was the growth of an organizational gulf between the IT groups, managers of the BSS functions, who controlled billing and CRM systems, and the OSS groups, who are responsible for the more network facing systems. Because of that disparate organizational evolution – the business processes evolved in much the same way. Everyone and everything eventually became disconnected or siloed. For a long time, with only a limited number of products, services, and network technologies to support and effectively no competition, that way of working, with its accompanying impacts to speed and quality of service was acceptable.
Remember, it was not that long ago that we were talking about a world where a data circuit might have a lead time of 30-45 days or where it might take a week to activate a voice service. With the lack of competition, and low customer expectation, carriers could get away with that.
Nowadays, the expectation is different. The maximum time limit you have to provision a Next Generation service – before the customer re-sends the order query or simply gives up and goes elsewhere – is about two minutes. We call it the two minute drill. That means that a service provider now has to do it all: the ordering, fulfillment, assurance and billing – all the while meeting the carrier’s and their customers’ more stringent quality standards, within two minutes or risk losing the business.
If you don’t have a single, consistent view across your service management systems and processes, linked directly to the products you are selling and the customer you are servicing, you simply cannot meet that accelerated need, at least not without throwing significant and expensive human resources at the problem. And the more humans involved, the longer it takes. The only real way to do it consistently is to bring BSS and OSS together as seamlessly as possible. So in order to complete the two minute drill our customers are looking to Amdocs to help them link their customers to their products and to their networks.
Mobile Europe: So operators are faced with an increasingly competitive market, but simultaneously they also need not just to attract and retain customers, but do so whilst launching ever-more services into the market, in an increasingly complex network environment.
John Lee:Absolutely, and you can see that need all over the world. There is a big implication in the way new technologies are hitting the network. Operators are faced not only with a technology migration from 2G to 3G, due to convergence they are also tasked with delivering a multitude of new products in as near to seamless quality of service as they can across those multiple network environments. Triple and quadruple play product offerings will make the access method irrelevant to customers. Whether at home, at the office, in the car, or somewhere in between, all they will care about is their experience and the performance of their services.
To support that converged service world-view, operators are making the decision to invest billions into next generation technologies such as IMS (IP multi-media subsystem). But there are a huge number of questions. There is a tremendous need, for example, for knowledge of what products to deliver over IMS, and how to do it profitably. Operators have already moved from providing only voice services or only video services to providing interactive and on-demand services, messaging, internet, gambling, music, gaming, informational content services, and services like push to talk. With IMS they are planning to introduce a whole gamut of new IP-based services and will be combining and blending services in new ways to create innovative applications. Services like call display on your TV are becoming reality today. It is only the beginning. How do they deliver on that service environment? How do they assure service delivery and quality at a customer level, and how do they do so in an optimized, replicable and measurable way?
The truth is you simply cannot do this – in this converged, multi-mode world – unless you can break down the silos that have been built up around each network and service process.
Mobile Europe: There is also the fact that operators are potentially creating more silos, as they move from being sole providers to part of a value chain that includes content partners, MVNO customers and enterprise systems integrators and service providers.
John Lee: It is true that the volume of product, and of partners, is potentially overwhelming. Across all those areas of operation, operators are asking “What will make the impact and generate the revenues I want?” Operators are faced with the need to create hundreds of products in a short amount of time, and make all of them applicable to a distinct customer base, and often resolve the billing and financial reconciliation with a large number of partners, such as content providers. They know they have to rationalize this value chain to help bring these products to market.
This lengthening value chain just makes it more important that, as you seek to keep your quality high across your sphere of operation, from a content provider to a demanding high value enterprise client, you have means to integrate all the processes of delivery and assurance, fulfillment and revenue management we have touched on.
Mobile Europe: So how does a technology provider like Amdocs help operators meet the challenge of these business drivers?
John Lee: I’ve said that we need to help operators build a bridge between their siloed applications, organizations, and business processes, so that they can integrate the ordering, activation, fulfillment, assurance, billing and customer care functions. Operators must feel they are working with a partner that allows them to take a holistic, end-to-end high level view across their OSS and BSS systems and processes. That is where Amdocs’ strong relationships with our customers come into play.
Our delivery method is to build on our successful experiences in customer care, revenue management and billing, and extend into more network facing management and optimization roles. Many times, this extension means going into areas where we don’t have strong product presence. Where we need to partner to provide best of breed solutions then we will do so. Our partnership with Cramer to develop a solution that links their expertise in the network inventory space with our expertise in customer-aware ordering and service management systems is a good example of that. So is our relationship with Micromuse to again relate an operator’s network monitoring and management functionality with its customer-aware processes.
In fact, it goes beyond delivering a range of solutions and asking customers to make sense of the integration. As we do this, instead of operators being faced with piecing together a best of breed portfolio, they can operate within an integrated suite of products, optimized to work with each other across the previous silos, providing a single view to relevant departments within the organization.
Mobile Europe: Is there also a sense that the best repository of knowledge might now lie outside some operators, especially when it comes to MVNOs and other service providers. Is there a role here for the managed service provider to work with an operator to manage some of these issues?
John Lee: Absolutely. Managed services will increasingly become an option for mobile providers as market competition forces them to focus on their core competency. The need for quality content means they will have to work extensively with 3rd party partners and the need for efficient systems may mean they will look to specialists to help them achieve that. This could mean turning non-core functions such as network and application maintenance, to third parties to maintain and implement.
A good example of this is outsourcing the billing function. We see a lot of this in North America where operators have taken what is a complex, costly and labor intensive function and turned it over to a specialist in this area. Operators retain control over the business process from a performance and strategy level, but they are able ramp down the resources they need to support it and focus on other “core” areas.
Mobile Europe: So where do you place operators right now on this overall path to a converged OSS architecture. How far into the journey have they got?
John Lee: I really don’t think they are a long way down this road. To their credit, a lot of them have individually taken a look at OSS as a silo, and at BSS as a silo, and tried to optimize every process at the level of their systems and organizations.
In doing so they have extracted pretty much all the efficiencies they can within the particular organizations, systems, and process architectures that they have. What they need now is transformation management.
I think operators have a good idea of where they want to be, and a fair grasp on where they are today, but they really need to start with a blank sheet of paper and say, “OK, I am here now, how do I get to there – where I know I need to be.”
They need to take all the pieces and look at them from a strategic level, break down their system, processes, and organizations in order to rationalize what transformation they need – then go out and do it.
But the good news for our customers is that we are creating competencies to help them do this, based on innovative solutions, robust product architectures, and our deep knowledge of industry best practices that can help transform these businesses.
Mobile Europe: Finally John, you have worked in the carrier space, and within systems integration and consulting. What was it about Amdocs as a company that convinced you it is best placed to deliver this vision to which you are clearly personally committed?
John Lee: I think the most important thing to understand – and it’s the reason I’m here at Amdocs – is that the leading provider in BSS solutions is willing, ready and able to commit to delivering products and services that build the bridge between the BSS and OSS worlds. That commitment recognizes the way the two sides of OSS and BSS within customer care and assurance, and ordering and fulfillment, are converging and that understanding and adapting to that convergence is absolutely critical to our customers’ future business success. It’s Amdocs’ vision for Integrated Customer Management (ICM) that links the network to the customer, but has the customer as the focus.
In summary, our customers know that the BSS and OSS systems are inevitably going to have to come together – and must support the kind of customer experience that their customers are demanding. Neither BSS or OSS alone can successfully deliver to this new dynamic, but together they will allow the most forward thinking service providers to speed up the journey to this new world.
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