Have you ever stopped to wonder why OSS and BSS exist? Why they were first invented, then implemented? Have you also pondered whether that initial “why?” statement still has any relevance today?
There was a time, decades ago, when the global telecommunication network was managed and monitored manually. There were operational systems for performing all the required administrative tasks, but they were human systems rather than machines. When computers became more widespread in the 1970s, why did telephone companies think to invest in using computer applications instead of humans, effectively building the first OSS / BSS / NMS tools?
As a side note, did you realise that the need behind the original OSS/BSS tools was so strong that it was the driving force behind Bell Labs first creating the Unix operating system and C programming language to support OSS/BSS development (refer here)?
Computers were still in their relative infancy so they were quite limited at that time. However, they were already good at performing repetitive tasks in an automated manner. Perfect for high-volume processes that follow well-defined activity sequences consistently, even if those sequences are complex and/or tedious.
The key words for those earliest OSS/BSS designs are still applicable today:
- High-volume
- Repeatable, consistent processes
- Complex logic processing
- Automated, efficient activities
Whilst the volumes are much larger and the solutions far more sophisticated, these same factors directly translate into the business outcomes that are still front-of-mind for operators today:
- Increase efficiency, decrease operational complexity to reduce costs
- Increase agility, increase operational speed to increase revenue growth
- Reduced costs plus revenue growth = improved competitiveness and profitability
Many OSS/BSS experts might be interested in the technical challenges and the solutions they solve, but it’s point three – improved competitiveness and profitability – that drives investment in OSS/BSS today, just as it did all those years ago.
That’s front-of-mind for us at SunVizion too, whether it’s the products we design or the solution implementation projects we deliver.
Naturally every OSS/BSS vendor and solution integrator makes similar claims, but let us back this up with examples of how we do things differently to most:
- Our solutions allow super-flexible modelling of infrastructure and services. New technologies should not require feature requests and code change in your OSS/BSS products. Configurable modelling without customisations increases your speed to market of new offerings and reducing costs
- Our solution provides one of the broadest functional capabilities on the market. These pre-integrated applications are designed to seamlessly facilitate the most common workflows from end-to-end. Compared with multi-vendor solutions, this ensures a consistent user experience and reduced risk of fallout due to pre-integration, thus reducing costs and risk of customer churn
- These applications and end-to-end workflows are built upon a common data model, where all data is in a common repository with consistent cross-linking. The SunVizion data model combines physical, logical and virtual with associations to services, customers, impacts, utilisation and so much more. As anyone who has tried to join disparate data sets will know, having all relationships mapped consistently in one place provides a huge advantage when deriving insights from OSS/BSS data.
The breadth of the SunVizion data model means these insights aren’t just restricted to small islands of data, but can deliver insights on operational efficiency and costs; infrastructure and capital efficiency; service efficiency and customer satisfaction; and more. Read our article about the Network Effect for a deeper analysis of the importance of a having a common data model compared with having to build a data warehouse from many different and mismatched data sources - With increased virtualisation, programmability and disaggregation of infrastructure, today’s telecommunication networks are highly dynamic. This poses two significant and related challenges for traditional OSS/BSS:
- Real-time traceability to understand what’s happening in the network as it shifts dynamically over time. As mentioned above, having a common data model ensures physical, logical and virtual infrastructure can be easily related. However, it’s the many other important associations inherent in our data model that allow you to monitor and manage modern networks in real-time. This includes collection of data for utilisation / capacity, auto-discovery of resource reservation / allocation / configuration, service state, performance / health. billing and much more
- Our modern web-scaling architecture facilitates scalability to any extent, whether that’s size of network, number of users, speed of polling, etc. This allows you future flexibility, but also right-sizing of capability to cost
- The modern architecture also supports operational flexibility by facilitating the many different channels that support your customers and your workforce. This can be in the form of mobile applications, web portals or via your existing IT solutions via our extensive API framework
- We’ve designed additional automations for high-volume, high-value activities such as automated network planning and design tools. These help to reduce design costs, infrastructure costs and ongoing cost of maintenance, whilst also speeding up customer activation times
If you’re currently considering how your next OSS/BSS project can help improve your organisation’s competitiveness and profitability, contact us so we can provide the support to back up the claims listed above and more.
