What’s on at Management World 2010: OSS and Managed Services

Yesterday evening, Comptel’s very own CTO, Gareth Senior, and Ralf Jaeger of Cisco Systems gave a talk on leveraging OSS for managed services as part of Management World 2010’s Successful Business Transformation Summit.  They focused on virtualized unified communications services and how the cloud environment is becoming a critical differentiator for service providers—especially in terms of guaranteed quality of service and combining assets in the network.  (If interested in seeing a copy of the presentation, contact [email protected]).

Some of the key OSS points made: it’s critical to have a full-service suite that offers a high degree of functionality out of the box.  The solutions should encompass not only the traditional elements, such as activation, order management, provisioning and inventory management, but also newer components like catalog that are important for next-generation business models, for example, Telco 2.0.

Wrapping up, Gareth and Ralf gave the Inter-Cloud Service Management Catalyst as an example of traditional OSS (service fulfillment) being applied to a brand new space.  The initiative involves the ability to run services between multiple clouds, partition networks into slices and provide end-customers with the tools they need to manage their use of on-demand cloud services.  But, more on the Inter-Cloud Service Management Catalyst coming up!

Leveraging OSS for managed services—and providing end-customers with the ability to make changes as they like—can certainly give service providers an edge (including time- and cost-savings as a result of automation and integration) over those that don’t know how to do it.