Billing/Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) Billing/Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) are the two areas undergoing the most revamping as IMS slowly reaches fruition. Both BSS and OSS must be separated from their formerly intimate association with services, abstracted out into a lego block-like, modular model that allows such systems to deal with any kind of service concocted by the myriad developers of would-be ‘killer apps’, not to mention all of those old reliable, existing applications that are already generating revenues but must be ported over into the IMS environment.are the two areas undergoing the most revamping as IMS slowly reaches fruition. Both BSS and OSS must be separated from their formerly intimate association with services, abstracted out into a lego block-like, modular model that allows such systems to deal with any kind of service concocted by the myriad developers of would-be ‘killer apps’, not to mention all of those old reliable, existing applications that are already generating revenues but must be ported over into the IMS environment.
Beau Atwater, Executive Director of Portfolio Strategy at Telcordia (www.telcordia.com), says, “As service providers pursue consumer-based services such as IPTV or even enterprise-based services, it won’t be easy to add services on top of existing networks. Cable or satellite network operators built their networks specifically for one purpose, and that was to deliver specific content over their respective networks. So they were able to build a network specifically to be used for, in cable’s case, video transmission, and that’s all that they wanted it to do. Today’s service providers, however, have multiuse networks. That brings in challenges. The big way to solve such a big challenge is to make sure that the back office systems are in order; if they aren’t, the providers will be adding silos of back office systems to support each individual service. That just doesn’t scale and eventually the service provider runs out of money or can’t compete with cable, or something like that.”
“So you need to have back office systems that are able to handle the whole breadth of services,” says Atwater, “and IPTV will be just one more service added to the overall system. In that realm and the realm of service quality management/customer experience, Telcordia sees as being critical to rolling out TV, digital services, content delivery, or whatever.”
“Billing is always critical,” says Atwater. “We separate OSS and BSS. Clearly you’re seeing the move to allow for customer self-service, ‘zero touch’ provisioning. A customer can now buy their own set-top box, plug it in, watch it register itself, and then it’s up and running. A splash page appears and the customer can enter account information. These processes may or may not move through CRM [Customer Relationship Management] systems. Instead, they may go through new systems that are hooked up directly to subscriber management. So you’re seeing quite a revolution in the BSS space.”
“The OSS space isn’t undergoing quite the same kind of revolution,” says Atwater, “except that the OSS systems must be extremely good at handling these multiple technologies. In the future, the ‘order entry’ part will feed directly into the OSS systems. This means that the OSS systems will be burdened with more requirements than they used to have. The OSS systems that can handle that will be the ones that are successful in helping service providers roll out these new services. That’s our focus here at Telcordia. We’re making sure that the ‘order-to-cash’ process is as efficient as possible.”
Chuck Stormon, Vice President, Strategy at Tekelec (www.tekelec.com) says, “Tekelec’s position is somewhat predictable, since we’re the ‘signaling Masters of the Universe,’ so to speak. We look at everything from that perspective. We have a bit of a bias since all of the signaling information in the world kind of goes through our equipment anyway; so it appears that we’re in a very unusual and favored position to be able to see everything that’s going on in the network.”
“With our customers, we wondered what would happen if we made use of our favored position to drive billin,” says Stormon. “That certainly has implications in the PSTN, but more importantly, as you look toward IMS, the billing part of the architecture is already oriented that way, where signaling information directly drives CDR generation, real-time rating, real-time charging and real-time billing both in pre- and postpaid modes.”
“To Tekelec, the signaling core, which is the STP [Signaling Transfer Point] in a traditional network and the CSCF [Call Session Control Function] in an IMS network are really the ideal sources for the XDR [External Data Representation] data to ‘feed’ billing,” says Stormon.
Stormon elaborates: “So Tekelec has built an integrated capability to generate Session Detail Records [SDRs] and Call Detail Records [CDRs] directly on our Eagle STP, and we’re in the process of doing the same thing for our TekCore CSCF for IMS. This is a little
avant garde,
since it bypasses much of the traditional BSS infrastructure that’s related to actual billing, but we don’t look at it as a replacement for a billing system; rather, we look at it as a set of real-time middleware that provides the link between the network elements and the billing system.”
Escaping the Silo
Tekelec’s Senior Manager, Travis Russell, says, “The theme in IMS is that all of those functions previously ‘silo-ed’ now become reusable. If you look at that theory and the architecture that goes with it, the way in the traditional network we’ve implemented the silo-ed functions is by basically having the switches produce the data in the access layer and then we have a fairly complicated data flow that gets all of that data pulled together and put into the billing stream.”
“In the IMS architecture, the approach is basically to outsource that from the switches and completely divorce that function from the access layer and put those functions into the control plane,” says Russell. “In fact, this idea of having the charging data collection and rating and basically the rules functions that are required to make decisions in the all path for prepaid and realtime transactions. Having all of that happen in the control plane makes a lot of sense.”
“One good example of a customer in this area would be Telemar,” says Russell, “the largest operator in Brazil, which approached us and said, ‘We want to move toward IMS, but we’re not prepared to replace the 5,000 switches in our access network and replace them with softswitches and install an entire broadband access layer. However, we do look the idea of moving toward the architecture and allowing us to deploy multiple services with our existing billing and prepaid platforms. So we’d like you, Tekelec, is to build out that part of the control plane that allows us to collect all of the charging information in the control plane at the STP and forward that on to our postpaid billing system and our prepaid platform’. So we’ve got that up and running at Telemar, network-wide, and in production.”
Russell explains further: “The way Telemar’s installation works is as follows: All of the switches are connected into 12 different STP nodes in the control plane. All of the switches send a little SS7 traffic up through the STP, even if it’s an intraswitch call, they just loop that right back. The reason it’s sending signaling up through the STP is purely to satisfy the need to capture that information in real time, to be able to stream a call detail record into their billing system.”
“With prepaid, the situation is a little more complicated,” says Russell, “because Telemar has an innovative new service wherein they offer prepaid with per minute billing to their wireline customers to try to provide a service on the landline phones that can rival some of the rate plans offered by the wireless operators. One of Telemar’s goals is to reduce the amount of ‘line erosion’ by offering innovative new services. This ‘permanent billing prepaid home phone’ is one example of one of the new services they’ve brought out. In this case, the only real additional complexity is that as we see the signaling come through our Tekelec Eagle for the call setup, we just recognized that it’s a prepaid call, we maintain the call state while we check the account balance of the subscriber and ensure that they’re authorized to make the call. This is pretty amazing — we’ve basically built out the billing structure in an IMS architecture and have applied it to a PSTN network.”
“We hope that the next step will be for Telemar to roll out additional services on the same platform,” says Russell, “which would yield several opportunities; for example, when they and their subscribers are ready for broadband services they could update their access network with the appropriate broadband access. In the meantime, Telemar can roll out a host of new services on their existing access network and enjoy many of the benefits of IMS with a modest investment at this point.”
Getting the Fly out of the IMS Ointment
As network operators and service providers wake up to what’s entailed in developing and deploying IMS network elements, in many cases various outside experts must be called in.
Craig Nichols, CEO and President of Visionael (www.visionael.com) says, “Visionael has an OSS application suite that focuses on IP service deployments. Our primary focus is enabling the management of IP next-gen services. We’re based in Palo Alto, California, with location across the U.S. and around the world. We’ve a profitable company that’s grown at about 50 percent per annum, riding the convergence wave that’s been going on in the OSS world.”
Nichols elaborates: “The customers we have fall into two major buckets: service providers such as Bell Mobility and managed service providers such as EDS. We serve the enterprise customers through the managed service providers. From a customer perspective, we have about 60 Tier 1, Fortune 500-type customers out there, whether they’re service providers, managed service providers or large enterprises.”
“Visionael recently acquired the Swedish company Defero that helped to fortify our position in the IP services arena,” says Nichols. “Defero did some really nice work the automation of IP services. We took that domain expertise and that automation capability and integrated it nicely into our product suites. That plays very well out there, and it supports our claim of being the IP services leader. There are other players out there; we differentiate ourselves primary by our ability to sell packaged software instead of frameworks.
“The OSS/BSS space is an interesting one,” says Nichols. “Clearly, a great deal of change is going on out there. Our perspective at the 30,000-foot level is that there’s clearly consolidation going on out there. The billing guys are clearly seeing the revenue drop-offs that are starting to appear and affect their business. That’s why they’re turning to other means of supplementing that at high growth areas. Clearly, the OSS space, particularly in what you’d call ‘service fulfillment’ is a very high growth area. We and our competitors are all experiencing rapid growth, since the providers that are fighting for their lives right now to introduce new services in a cost effective manner that will supplement the loss of some of their other business. The analogy that I use is this: We’re like an ‘arms dealer’, supplying ‘arms’ to all of the different factions out there fighting the ‘war’ between the cable companies and the traditional telcos, as well as the ISPs.”
“So, Visionael focuses on providing tools that really enable those guys to compete with one another,” says Nichols, “whether it be helping a company such as Comcast to deploy multiple services using the same infrastructure to fight the AT&Ts, or else working with the Bell companies to make them more effective and to move into the IP world.”
“Other things are happening in this field. I come from the IT world, not traditional telecom, so I see the telecom world in general becoming more IT-like,” says Nichols. “Obviously the network technologies are becoming more like IT. The model and the way providers deliver solutions to companies are really changing. It used to be that these providers would have huge custom development staff to develop everything that they needed, because they felt they needed things done exactly a certain way. They were very different. The next stage in their evolution was to vendors that appeared around the time Visionael started in 1997 and they still exist today — more ‘framework’ vendors. These are guys that will think up some technology and then they’ll put a load of people on it to make it work the way you want it to. The providers simply moved from in-sourcing to outsourcing the same old model, which I don’t believe has ‘legs’ in the long term. “
“Instead, I think most providers are now heading reasonably quickly toward the COTs [Commercial Off-the-Shelf] model,” says Nichols, “whereby there’s applications out there that can integrate with all the different baskets out there, including BSS, but to do it in a way that’s very cost effective and doesn’t involve hundreds of people to deploy it, nor huge costs of upgrading when upgrades occur. Visionael is coming into the game in a major way to really enable that, because we believe we’re one of the few companies that can do it well. About 80 percent of our revenue is licensed revenue. Compare that with most of the other OSS players that obtain 50 percent or even less from licensing. We think the customers appreciate our approach, since it results in lower cost of ownership, faster implementation, and getting the benefit of what’s learned from the other customers out there in the form of a packaged solution that’s smartly put together to address their needs.”
As Brian Cappellani CTO for Sigma Systems (www.sigma-systems.com), says, “Some of the IMS euphoria is wearing off a bit now the network operators understand what it means to deploy the IMS architecture. But even with all of the hype around IMS and what it could do, IMS as a specification and concept, still really describes what you’re doing on the network. It doesn’t really specify how you operationalize these services, or can actually deliver those services end-to-end to your customer, including billing and allowing them to order the services. That’s the big gap we’ve seen in terms of operators looking at implementing IMS. Sure there are lots of standards around describing how devices on the networks might want to talk to each other, but how do you bring these things into your back office? How do you truly take advantage of this idea of rapid service creation, or being able to utilize existing assets and repurpose them to roll out other services — sort of build services upon existing capabilities?”
“Service providers need to look at their OSS layer, make sure that they’ve got what we call an ‘All-Play’ service management layer, to make sure that those promises can actually turn into reality,” says Cappellani.
“IMS is really no different than other evolving network architectures,” says Cappellani. “You devise a way of dealing with things on the network and then you suddenly realize that it has to be plugged into a business and you must actually make these network capabilities available to customers. They have to make the capabilities fit into their overall processes, with integration into their OSS and BSS layers. They have to be able to allow customers to be able to order these services, and manage and control them. So you need to have that layer.”
Sigma’s Preston Gilmer, Vice President of Product Marketing, says, “Operators now see that IMS is going to change what they do at the network layer, and they realize they should make sure that it doesn’t force them to make dramatic changes or reinvestment in their BSS or OSS layer. They’re also realizing that no one is going to move to IMS tomorrow, and when they do they’ll probably not instantly flip every service they have over to IMS. Instead, there will be a more evolutionary than revolutionary path toward IMS. Operators want to make sure that they’re protecting their investment as they move to this new technology. And all of these things are what we feel operators need to have — this ‘all play’ service management layer, to shield some of these upstream systems — whether it be BSS or other OSS layers — and to get them really talking at the service layer. So these things are talking to what we call a service level abstraction. You don’t necessarily care how the services are delivered, you want to talk about the services themselves. That’s the language you want to use at the BSS level — and at a customer level as well, for example.” (Brian Cappellani CTO and Preston Gilmer elaborate on these ideas in their “IMS is Ready For Prime-Time” article that follows this piece.)
It’s All About Concept-to-Cash
David Sharpley Vice President, Product Marketing and Alliances of Oracle’s Communications Global Business Unit, says, “We view IMS as clearly part of the network evolution that’s unfolding within the world of service providers. At the recent 3GSM show, it’s clear that IMS is becoming mainstream and is indeed moving to the forefront of network discussions. Many vendors are repositioning some of their capabilities as being IMS compliant.”
“With IMS you’ve got a separation of the network, the services and the software to support them,” says Sharpley. “Therefore, the intelligence is no longer embedded within the network layer and is now free to move into the IMS layer. That separation, in turn, implies that you’ve got a greater number of network and service elements within the IMS framework that now need to be managed, populated with subscriber information, and interacting both from a network perspective as well as upstream with any of the many types of billing processes. So we’re seeing the large number of network and service applications that are resident within an IMS framework obviously create some complexity for the network operators.”
Adds Sharpley: “Also, because IMS is software-based, one of the key aspects of all the different IMS-related applications and services is how to do billing, and the billing control function, given that these apps and services are real-time in nature. We see that as being absolutely critical in terms of dipping into the system and determining whether a charge balance is available, whether a particular customer is creditworthy, and doing that in real time, given the fact that you’ve got different types of SIP sessions that may also be taking place at the infrastructure layer. For example, when do those sessions get allowed and then terminated?”
“Oracle focuses on a number of different approaches,” says Sharpley. “First, we recently launched our Concept-to-Cash portfolio of software solutions for the communications industry, which merges industry-specific Billing & Revenue Management [BRM] and service fulfillment applications with the capabilities of Oracle Applications, Oracle Service Delivery Platform, and Oracle Database. It’s all about our ability to enable providers to create new services, to allow for sales campaigns around them, and to fulfill the new services in terms of their instant service activation on the network and any updates of subscriber information. Once the service has been turned on, the real-time nature of collecting data from that and rating and billing it in real-time are also now possible, since Oracle Communications can provide everything from real-time customer insight to billing and revenue management.”
Interestingly, 19 of the world’s top 20 communications companies already run Oracle applications.
Bones of Contention
Clearly, BSS and OSS systems will undergo drastic evolutionary changes over the next few years, as the concepts of billing, operations support and other back-office operations are adapted to function (hopefully) smoothly in the brave new world of IMS. Some approaches will be more successful than others, depending upon the nature of the service(s). We’ll keep you abreast as to how the BSS/OSS dust is settling on the telecom landscape. . . 
Richard Grigonis is the Executive Editor of
TMC’s (News - Alert)
IP Communications Group.
|
SUBSCRIPTIONS
TMCnet LOGIN
WEBINARS
