A new report from Frost & Sullivan suggests that 60% of communication service providers (CSPs) view growing competition as one of the key reasons behind placing a greater focus on customer experience and the speed at which they bring new services to market.
A new report from Frost & Sullivan suggests that 60% of communication service providers (CSPs) view growing competition as one of the key reasons behind placing a greater focus on customer experience and the speed at which they bring new services to market.
The white paper, ‘OSS/BSS Integration – The Building Block of the Era of “Big Data”’, commissioned on behalf of Comarch, surveyed global Tier 1 CSPs towards the end of 2010 and revealed what are seen as the most significant challenges faced by leading service providers today.
Among the other challenges faced by CSPs were efficiency improvements (40%), growing customer expectations (37%) and reduced time to market (30%).
Thirty percent of those surveyed said they were still struggling to reduce the complexity of their company’s structure, while a further 20 percent suggested that keeping pace with technology trends and sustaining profitable growth were keeping them awake at night.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the introduction of new IP-based services to replace traditional communications has altered the competitive landscape forever. This, coupled with the widespread availability of broadband access, has enabled the emergence of numerous over-the-top (OTT) providers like Skype, Google and Facebook to challenge the revenue generating potential of CSPs by sapping resources like bandwidth.
Frost & Sullivan notes that in 2010, for instance, the global data usage associated with video consumption reached 4 gigabytes per user per month – a figure expected to rise further during the next five years.
With CSPs having been forced to morph from network providers into service aggregators, the report confirms that bridging the gap between OSS/BSS remains an efficient way of overcoming such challenges.
It also reasons that CSPs should compete with OTT providers on an equal footing where possible to forge cooperative agreements. Indeed, with the help of OSS/BSS unification, the report explains that CSPs are able to provide the quality assurance demanded by OTT players.
The report highlighted the need for convergence and the breaking down of isolated silos of software designed around separate technologies, with horizontally integrated OSS/BSS having become a desired solution among CSPs today.
Additionally, some 85 percent of operators interviewed said they preferred commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS) as opposed to those built in-house or requiring significant customisation. At the same time many revealed insisting on systems that are pre-integrated with other COTS solutions and require no special customisation for operation within their own architecture.
With most CSPs unable to meet the challenges of the future by cutting costs, Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, BSS product manager, Comarch, said that convergent OSS/BSS systems helped to reduce the time-to-market for new services as well as the costs needed to build new products.
“In the case of services for business customers, many offers are personalised and it is extremely important to base [these] on solid service definition information,” he explained. “ Here BSS/OSS convergence saves time and significantly shortens product definition. Service fulfillment based on consistent service (OSS) and product (BSS) definition also allows saving time and costs.”
“Thanks to this, adding new products does not require reconfiguration of provisioning systems. In addition, proactive fault management provides information to CRM about the problem and when corrections are expected, and this has a positive impact on customer experience,” he added.
By Mark Dye, associate editor, VanillaPlus
