Operations Support Systems and IMS

By Richard "Zippy" Grigonis
We all know that the IMS architecture enables carriers and service providers to quickly and inexpensively bring forth new and exciting revenue-generating services for their customers. Still, while it’s terrific to be able to ‘de-silo’ applications, there’s the whole matter of what Operations Support Systems (OSS)/billing and Service Development Platforms (SDPs) actually play well with IMS.

One company that has long focused on the OSS challenge is Clarity International, a global OSS business process automation company that provides a pre-integrated product and database that streamlines the elements of OSS into a single suite. Inventory, Fulfillment and Assurance applications link to a single SID based database, enabling real-time executive visibility of the network’s impact on revenues and customer experience. Clarity manages over 120 million subscribers globally in Tier 1 incumbent and next-generation telcos. Clarity’s products are network and service neutral, driven by configurable templates and workflows, which help telcos cut time-to-market for new services by two-thirds.

Tony Kalcina, Clarity’s CEO, says, “The vision of Clarity International as an OSS company is based on our belief that the old ‘silo’ method of developing and deploying services was too restrictive. Providers spend too much time, effort and money. So we determined that we could solve this in a unified manner. We deliver to the market a modular yet unified capability that allows for the automation of the processes of fulfillment and assurance. To some extent our vision was pretty much matching the vision of what IMS and related forums wanted to do with OSS. Our thinking in moving forward is that we believe the ultimate end game is the empowerment and simplification of the complexity of the network to the subscriber — the end-customer. So we feel that the ultimate endgame is to give the subscriber the ability to self-manage his or her own telecom infrastructure in terms of what was ordered and how they tread their own telecom environment.”

“As a company, we’ve told our customers, mostly in emerging markets, to automate their fulfillment and assurance with a unified database and unified real-time engine that can work with various modules of functionality,” says Kalcina. “We’re moving closer to the ideal, to the point where we’re creating self-service infrastructures that basically drive the fulfillment and assurance engine. So we see the whole thing as a sort of service delivery factory, and we see the implementation, whether it be with one unified product or a compliant suite of building blocks, to evolve toward that level of subscriber empowerment. That alone has a lot of implications in terms of how we dovetail legacy technologies with the latest technologies. In the process we encounter a lot of hype but we can achieve an average sum total improvement in the industry, and I see companies heading toward adopting more unified, automated, self-service infrastructure.”

Jon Wells, an OSS Consultant at Clarity, says, “One angle is the simplification that the OSS approach brings generally to the table, and another angle looks at what IMS actually means for OSS simplification more specifically. One thing we see is that the elements of our product share the rhetoric around IMS. It will actually simplify service delivery to the extent that the VOSS becomes a very thin layer. So you have IMS suggesting a general simplification. When you look at what IMS is today, you can see already relatively simple services that are almost trying to emulate some of the legacy services such as voice and also emulate some of the NGN services, such as IPTV. In those types of scenarios, the role for the OSS is a bit simplified. But when you look at IMS in its widest sense, it can do things such as link together multiple service components and deliver them in flexible and innovative ways. In such situations the pressure point will come back onto the OSS, because it no longer becomes just a case of provisioning the IMS service in the HSS [Home Subscriber Server], the subscriber repository for IMS. There will appear the need to actually provision many other technology components to deliver these potentially more complicated services.”

“The same is also true for the assurance side,” says Wells. “Instead of just having to do some simple monitoring at the IMS layer, it’s also going to be important to do monitoring and such things at the applications server layer and also the network layer, in order to bring back a kind of consolidated view of what’s happening with the IMS services. One of the ambitions of IMS is thus to simplify the OSS. What we at Clarity believe is that as IMS starts to develop and delivers what it really can do, then it will take a unified OSS to make sense of many of the complexities that will be exposed in the course of provisioning and assurance.”

The Oracle of OSS

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.

Companie's Mentioned in this Article:

Oracle  (News - Alert)
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