OSS/BSS World Summit in London, 8-9 September

Posted: September 10th, 2010 | Author: Bob Machin | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

This week, OSS/BSS World hosted a conference in the Park Lane Hotel, London. I went along for Comptel, and here, pretty much as I wrote them, are my notes from the two days.

Overall Thoughts

Well-attended and heavily-sponsored conference, indicating that OSS and BSS are still hot topics in the industry. Good mix of operators, SIs and many hardware and software vendors. Full agenda (somewhat weighted to the BSS side ) with speakers limited to 20- or 25-minute slots for presentations and questions—an increasingly common (and welcome) approach at conferences. Contributions from the floor seemed to me to be relatively few; after the first three keynote presentations, there had been no questions at all. Perhaps we’re at a stage where everyone understands the big themes and is really looking for solid, proven business cases and answers. I suspect that the audience may have been looking for validation of ideas that are already well-grounded about future developments in the industry; if so, they are not likely to have been disappointed.

Themes

Common themes which prevailed across the two days included:

  • Customer experience, and focusing on the key points of customer interaction (referenced by Lois Kraus of AT&T as LB-GUPS, or Learn, Buy, Get, Use, Pay, Service, an acronym which even she didn’t seem very keen on). The frequency of new service rollout is making it harder than ever to keep on top of the customer experience. Customer data (and understanding) was regularly referenced as a key differentiator for telcos and potentially a secondary asset which could be exploited more effectively in relationships with partners. Customer retention strategy was acknowledged as more important than acquisition strategy by Emtel of Mauritius.
  • Cloud services: many of the questions which arose were of the ‘what difference will Cloud make to this?’ variety. From the platform, the general take was that Cloud was a different world—with great revenue potential but also putting very different demands on carriers. George Nazi of BT Group (President, 21CN, Global Networks and Computing Infrastructure) believed carriers saw it as their ‘single biggest strategic challenge’ but was bullish about its potential and viability. AT&T, when asked about whether its OSS/BSS platform (developed to be universal for all services) would support Cloud, stated that yes, initially it would be used, but later expressed doubt that that approach would be sustainable and suspected that the Cloud business would eventually need its own support. The idea of using Cloud services to support their own businesses (using remote infrastructure and storage as a service, for example) is already prevalent among new ’agile’ communications players.
  • Services environment complexity and how it should be handled. Convergence, transformation and consolidation were regularly referenced, as were issues around legacy IT and services and the challenges of migrating these to new platforms (it seems that some problems will always be with us). ‘Transformation’, in particular, was addressed almost as a desirable end in its own right by several speakers (particularly those with SI interests) although the nature and objectives of any transformation could naturally vary greatly. HP cited consolidation and cost reduction, customer experience improvement and the shift to new business models as common objectives of transformation exercises. At a higher level, ‘transformation’ was positioned as a key enabler of an almost philosophical shift in the business—from ‘technology to business’ (look out for T2B as an emerging acronym) and from ‘survive to thrive’. SDPs continue to be popular as a means to open up the service environment to third-party providers and developers. Telefonica are vigorous proponents of this approach and claim to have reduced service rollout time from 6-12 months to 6-12 weeks (quoted by Capgemini).
  • Revenue challenges, particularly arising from the ‘data crunch’. The end of flat-rate charging was regularly cited but with few firm theories about how variable charging would play. Orga recited what is fast becoming the industry mantra on real-time charging and policy control as the twin levers of power.
  • Machine-to-machine communications and other plays on connected devices, though with little firm opinion of the impact of this on carriers. This was part of a broader theme, however, that ‘communications services’ weren’t dead, that we would see interesting things emerge in the next few years (from the interconnection of devices, in particular) and that carriers, as masters of networks and conmmunications, had a big part to play in the transformation of society which this would drive. As Paulo Collela of Ericsson opined, CSPs should not resign themselves to just being enablers for new players, but should look for ways to be significant agents of change themselves. On day two, Sanjay Mewada of Netcracker spoke on the value of machine-to-machine communications, valuing this as already a $14 billion business—but significantly, he included handset-to-machine transactions, or mobile payments, in his definition of M2M.


Leave a Reply