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CSPs can and should leverage their OSSs to move from a reactive organizational model to a proactive one.

OSS Meets the Challenges to Expansion

Since carriers are trying to meet a key goal of rapid introduction and delivery of new services as they expand globally, OSS solutions are in demand. According to Michael Kearns, vendors are “...seeing significant demand for automated service ordering & fulfillment solutions driven mainly by carriers wanting to extend their service offerings to deliver a diverse range of network and cloud services to customers and partners that transit not just their network and data centers, but also other carrier networks and data centers. The key to success for such systems is true service and network abstraction that is independent of vendors, carrier, and service type.”

Additionally, CSPs can, and should, leverage their OSSs to move from a reactive organizational model to a proactive one, says Jeff Parker, CEO, Monolith Software. “One of the biggest challenges will be instrumenting the infrastructure to be monitored for KPI’s and metrics,” Parker told Pipeline. “Historically, operations teams have been very fault driven and fault focused. That is reactive. The bad thing already happened. The customer has already had a bad experience. CSP’s need to migrate from a fault focused world to a metric based, SLA/KPI driven world. CSP’s need to spot problematic trends and degradations before customers experience a problem. This is why there is so much focus on CEM at this time.”

And no expansion effort is effective without proper planning and research; another OSS function. “Capacity planning and analytics are key for expansion efforts so that operators can decide the RoI and instruct their sales/marketing effectively on where and how to expand.” points out Anand Venkat.

Marie Fiala Timlin identified some additional areas where OSS can meet the challenge: “It is crucial to have network management policies that are consistent throughout their network, even across access networks (e.g. operators offering both cable & WiFi), and policy control components that can interoperate with other vendor network elements. Especially for usage-based billing, the requirement is to have credible accurate usage data throughout the network--no carrier wants to be in the headline news due to inaccurate over-billing incidents.”

The Future is Bright

As we've seen, the overwhelming consensus is that communications networks will continue to expand globally at a very rapid rate, and recent research from Cisco, Infonetics, and even the FCC sings in unison. This much is certain. Whether or not carriers will keep pace with demand and customer satisfaction and continue to enjoy substantial year-over-year profits remains to be seen, as OSS solutions are critical in this evolution.

From his perspective, Amartus CEO Michael Kearns believes, “Mergers and acquisitions will continue as a means to expand networks and grow market share, however the emergence of interconnect and wholesale service offering, as well as local loop unbundling, means that carriers now have greater choice when it comes to delivering global services and compete on a level playing field.”



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