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The Path of Most Resistance
Because operators have been racing to create new revenue streams, they have continued to create services in silos, resulting in a maze of integration points, access portals, and brittle lifecycle management processes that make things tougher for partners. “Thinking from a 3rd party service provider perspective,” says Lucia Gradinariu, founder and principal consultant at LGG Solutions, LLC, “this is very difficult to navigate in creating new experiences for end consumers. What company in their right mind would try to work through a telco’s operational maze if they can get to the end consumer more directly through another channel?” This, Gradinariu says, explains the over-the-top challenge carriers face today.
Though operators have been able to coast a bit on what Gradinariu terms a “Golden Pipe” strategy of selling high-speed and mobile Internet access, which she says will grow into a $1 trillion business by 2015, the relief is only temporary. “Operators have to bring in an additional $1 to 2 trillion in the next five to 10 years to replace current revenue from core business” that is already declining, she says.
By itself, exposing core SDP functionality won’t be enough. As everything migrates to e2e IP, telco prices for voice will have to match up to Skype and Google offerings—that is, if the entire voice world isn’t replaced by new forms of communications entertained today by social networks such as Facebook or Tencent. For that reason, opening up the network to 3rd party developers and app stores might be part of a solution, but it won’t be the complete solution. In fact, attempts to do so might serve to further emphasize the difficulties of integrating developer mindsets with consumer mindsets in operator environments.
“Revenue sharing with millions of partners, ‘Freemium’ business models based on ‘in App’ payment, and multiple types of payments are costly to realize in the operator domain,” says Gradinariu. She notes that the complexity 3rd parties experience when attempting to work with operators may become the real driver for business transformation and tighter integration between SDP and BSS. Some of the key “enablers” to make these relationships work sit within the SDP, and others within BSS.
Integrating SDP with BSS
It’s already become clear that best
practices for integration around SOA,
Open APIs, and common data models
have helped operators, but at times
have also generated more work, cost
and complexity than initially
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What company in their right mind would try to work through a telco’s operational maze if they can get to the end consumer more directly through another channel?” - Lucia Gradinariu, founder and principal consultant, LGG Solutions. |
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anticipated. Some believe, therefore,
that the collusion of next-gen SDP and
BSS will shape platforms that drive new
business development in cross-industry
service, content, and application
innovations. They believe in the
integration of NGSDP and NGBSS as a
means to help operators expose
assets and relationships more cost
effectively. That would help
organizations of all types (operators or
3rd party) to create new services and
offerings, or at least to contribute
components of new services and
offerings.
For operators, exposure of BSS capabilities alongside SDPs will possibly help them monetize existing investments, systems, and experiences. It can also help stimulate service innovation by their own people, who need new and faster ways to combine key components of product catalogs into services. By combining Web Services with assets from third parties, it is possible that marketing and product development teams can piece together service components and integrate them into a comprehensive master product catalog—one capable of offering more compelling characteristics that can be assembled in different ways for existing and future services.
Because a single transaction today can include voice, video, data, and application transmissions that cross multiple OSS and BSS systems, the ability to deliver and assure carrier-grade availability and performance levels will be of paramount importance. That will further magnify the importance of the SDP as a means for key audiences internal to the operator—such as operations teams—to resolve service issues quickly and avoid finger-pointing when services perform poorly.
Building Flow-Through Provisioning
Other than assuring service performance and fostering accountability among value-chain partners, integrating SDP and BSS can bring benefits such as flow-through provisioning. “If product catalogs can become an integral part of the SDP, then there emerges an important integration point between the SDP and BSS,” explains Shira Levine, directing analyst, next-gen OSS and policy, Infonetics Research.
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