Outsourcing in the Service Creation Environment

By Micah Singer

As Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology becomes more and more a fait accompli with the future of voice communications, service providers of all types - cable companies, MSOs, ISPs, MVNOs - are either at the discussion, planning or testing phase of new VoIP service offerings. Cable companies, because of their existing subscriber base and their managed bandwidth to the end user, find themselves in an enviable position. In many cases, these companies have performed trials or invested hard cost in a VoIP system that has not delivered a return on investment.

In this article, we will assess the details a service provider must consider prior to a VoIP deployment, assist service providers as they attempt to make sense of the available options and, ultimately, help service providers construct a roadmap to get their VoIP plans from the drawing board to launch and revenue generation.

One drawback to extensive planning is it lends itself to the desire for control, complexity and stability. When you think about how your company will sell and support VoIP and the opportunities for growth in this exciting market, you start to dissect why business models have and have not worked, and to come up with a concise list of how and why yours will work.

These are needs that will change over time. Reseller programs, of which there are many, (“VoIP reseller” nets 187,000 hits on Google) - including several notables such as RNK, Delta 3 and BroadVoice - are generally well-positioned to hasten speed-to-market and reduce complexity while providing a service provider with limited control, limited input and, most importantly, limited ownership of their customer base.

Enter the concept of outsourcing and the “Service Creation Environment”. Simply put, this term refers to a solution which allows a service provider to engineer, integrate and deploy the services they want to market across the best available (stable, tested and scaleable) systems that perform billing, unified messaging, call routing, and a variety of applications such as hosted PBX, Centrex, conferencing, video, and new services as they emerge. The goal for the service provider is to fully outsource as much of the complexity as possible without losing control and flexibility.

More traditionally defined by Atul Varshneya in a March 2004 article entitled, “Service Creation in Next-Generation Networks” - “What Is Service Creation? Creating service logic means implementing the flow of network protocol interactions, data modifications and control-flow decisions to deliver the intended features to the end-user.”

I. Components of a VoIP Deployment

Selecting Core technology

Once you have determined your strategy for marketing, selling and providing support to your current and future customers you need to create, integrate, deploy and manage the services.

Many outsourced solution providers have opted to use a ‘best of breed’ approach, aggregating various components of hardware and software, which have been tested for stability and scale-ability and are generally used in the larger deployment.

Understanding the predictability of the components that will ultimately run your phone service offering is crucial. As such, it is important to note the following risk/reward matrix for selecting open source (reward: free, large developer community; risk: poor documentation, not scale tested), homegrown (reward: leverage-able; risk: no support organization, costly to maintain) or one-stop shopping (reward: single source for resolution; risk: costly, slower upgrades, less focused development organization).

Making it work

There are six key areas of consideration when creating your service: (i) Identifying the correct mix of in-source and out-source people on your team; (ii) choosing a solid IP network for originating and terminating calls; (iii) creating understandable provisioning for each service; (iv) accurately billing; (v) monitoring quality, profitability and fraud; and (vi) web integration.

As in most businesses, your most important asset is the people who work on your systems. As I will discuss below, this component is without question one of the largest hidden benefits of outsourcing your service creation. Following is a list of the various skill sets you will need on your VoIP deployment and support team:

• Voice routing quality of service

• LAN qualification and troubleshooting

• System integration/management

• Billing management

• Online portal management

• Sysadmin - general system administration

• SIP Phone/IAD/CPE testing and troubleshooting

• Mid-level knowledge of configuration on all call processing systems

• Vendor support contracts:

• bug relief

• deep knowledge of systems

• Remote Hands

Selecting the correct network for the interaction between the customer’s phone and the core VoIP infrastructure is fraught with peril. The short version is that if your customer base can tolerate outages, then the public “best effort” Internet will suffice and actually works remarkably well most of the time. If not, then some form of a managed network is needed. This ability to guarantee quality of service is of the utmost importance to enterprise customers who represent the larger economic opportunity. Cable companies, LECs, ISPs and CLECs are in a favorable position to leverage this last mile relationship.

Inherently, VoIP adopters are Web-savvy and expect online provisioning, support and access to a lot of controls for self-management. You need to think carefully through all of the actors in your VoIP offering - end users, company telecom managers, agents, resellers, customer service representatives and management - and make sure you select account provisioning and management tools that are easy to configure for all layers and types of access and flexible to the addition of future service offerings. If you intend to integrate VoIP infrastructure with legacy systems you’ll need a flexible middleware application and, generally, professional services work followed by QA testing and deployment support.

With its Cortex® system, this is precisely what VoIP Logic (www.voiplogic.com), my company, provides.

As your business grows, it requires more and more monitoring, accounting, quality of service, and fraud reporting. Smart reporting should provide a selection of report output format, such as .csv, .xml, .rtf and .xls.

Billing a new service offering can be quite easy if you have a robust legacy billing system that can support new plan types, input sources and account structures. However, there are myriad issues around taxation, commission management, payment processing integration and how you choose to present the invoice - online, via email with a link, via email with an attachment or via snail mail. It is at this point in the development process to think about how you will integrate double and triple plays into a single billing experience - effectively addressing the future and future-proofing.

Finally, and in some ways a combination of many of the other items, is Web integration. Your most frequent touch point to your customer is the Web - from self-management of phone features, voicemail, auto-attendants, new corporate phone users to managing billing and payment - the web is the method of choice for ease of use and for lowest operating cost to the service provider. Generally, the only calls you should take are fault reporting or special requests. In addition, your own workforce can easily be spread, outsourced or remote.

II. How to Make Good Choices

Many of the decisions you will be required to make are based on common sense and a few are based on the specifics of how you intend to use VoIP technology.

I strongly believe that if you intend to outsource all or part of the components required, you must find a neutral supplier with experience and the right mix of the outsourced services and solutions that you require or plan to grow to require. “Right” includes right for your budget as well as your service plans.

In addition, you should assign the right people to the right roles internally and make sure these pairing synchs with your outsourced provider.

A particularly cumbersome issue is LAN qualification of your existing and potential customers. The LAN and Layer 3 prioritization in general can require a fairly technical skill set to troubleshoot but as it will be the single largest engineering issue it is good to in-source. Other than that a mid-level understanding of the technology and how to operate it is generally sufficient if you are working with a strong outsource “service creation environment” provider.

Lastly, focus your dollars on the web integration component and innovative ways of using the technology. There are more and more “me, too” offering on the market and the ones that tend to survive are the ones that have thought more closely about the return on investment and how to increase average revenue per user rather than how to make the same thing cheaper. The ones that tend to get rewarded are the offerings that are most innovative with the technology like Skype and Grand Central more recently.

III. How to Start

Generally, the first step is to construct a roadmap of the tasks you must accomplish to get from drawing board to launch. You should expect a reseller to launch you in three to five days once you have provided all relevant information; an outsourced provider in one to three months once you have designated your configurations and have been sufficiently trained, and if you purchase, deploy and integrate all relevant systems in-house from six months to eighteen months depending on available resources.

It is essential that your roadmap cover all events - expected and unexpected - to happen during the interval from spending approval until launch.

Often, all-in-one providers such as Nortel and Lucent, will assign professional services project management that will assist with road-mapping as this vendor will own all components of your project. While thorough, this is not an economically feasible choice for many carriers. The sort of company that can assist in ‘best of breed’ deployments are outsource “service creation” providers and systems integrators.

It pays to tap into their deeper technical resources and knowledge.

In any case, find a solution provider or providers that treat you like a partner. Whether you are buying and building, reselling, or outsourcing service creation, you must trust and be able to rely on your vendors to meet the expectations you set in common. you're good people- just remind me never to go up against you. IT

Micah Singer is CEO of VoIP Logic. For more information, visit the company online at www.VoIPLogic.com. You can reach him at [email protected].

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