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By many estimates, we have reached or will reach 5 billion mobile phone users in 2011. The Internet consists of 50 billion connected devices. Facebook has surpassed the 500 million user mark. Twitter has added over 100 million users. The Beatles sold almost 1.5 million songs in a week after going live on iTunes. Streaming video became the largest volume of video traffic on the Internet. And Amazon.com sold 50% more e-books than hardcovers in 2010. So, when we think about the intersection of explosive demand, monetization, network and service performance, customer experience, and public image, OSS/BSS falls squarely in the center.
Going Vertical
Because communications technology has become a central part of everything from pop culture lifestyle to SaaS offerings and cloud computing, it is shifting the perception of what the operator’s business really is. A CSP may have always thought of itself as a communications provider, but now it needs to be a vertical-specific solution enabler providing both bandwidth and applications with a focus on quality.
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"The communications service provider is the unifying and enabling element for a whole family of partners." |
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Operators need to ask themselves who they can effectively partner with in order to cater to the demographic segment, and industry verticals, in which they want to win. Partnerships have to drive retention and reduce churn by providing added value and rewards. If a partnership can drive retention, reduce churn, and make customers happier, then it monetizes the relationship and, in turn, monetizes underlying technology investments.
Complexity and Simplicity
With new generations of networks and services emerging rapidly, there is a distinct opportunity to build the supporting OSS/BSS infrastructure right the first time, and a huge risk — in terms of customer experience, cost, and profitability — in failing to do so.
The increasing demand on the OSS/BSS infrastructure mirrors the exploding demand for devices, services, and transactions.
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Different verticals are using, and want to use, mobility and connectivity in different ways. They have increasing data, functionality, and connectivity requirements and are driving more machine-to-machine communications based on, for example, telemetry and logistical data. There is an opportunity to provide vertical-specific solutions that is largely untapped thus far.
To succeed in specific verticals,
including the consumer vertical,
partnerships are critically important.
But the carrier can’t be just one more
logo in a list of partners, as has often
been the case in the past. The
communications service provider is the
unifying and enabling element for a
whole family of partners that leverage
communications channels and
application functionality — even OSS/
BSS functionality — to deliver value and to communicate and interact with
customers.
In evaluating a brand — or an operator in any vertical or family of partners — customers ask themselves what benefits they can get by being a customer.
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Consider that an operator with 50 million subscribers, even for one hot service, can expect batch operations involving 1 million transactions per cycle, 50,000 real-time billing transactions per second, 200 order requests per second, and as many as 1,000 requests per order with an end-to-end order execution time of five seconds or less.
Beyond these requirements, the OSS/BSS environment needs to provide convergent solutions for 2G through 4G, and beyond — and from voice to an infinite range of value-added services and solutions — to achieve a true economy of scale. It needs to support adaptable business models, with inevitable variations on the MVNE/MVNO theme, especially in a partnership-intensive environment. And it needs to support a variety of customer billing relationships — prepaid, postpaid, and hybrid billing — as well as payment options from monthly statements and credit/debit cards, to new forms of value transfer, affinity relationships, rewards redemptions, and so forth.
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