Consolidate system stacks and accelerate time to market with multi-tenant BSS

The starburst of services CSPs’ BSS now have to support has meant CSPs are moving away from the one system per service approach that has seen an architecture of stovepiped stacks created. Those stovepipes now have to be broken down and CSPs are looking to re-use BSS to support multiple services simultaneously. Here, Andreas Opelt, the vice president of sales and marketing at Infonova, tells VanillaPlus how CSP attitudes and requirements are changing. Infonova customer, Helene Graham, the CTO at Ireland’s largest telecoms provider eircom Group, which has recently deployed Infonova’s R6 concept-to-cash platform, and Andreas Gabriel, the vice president of product management at Infonova, join the discussion.

web analytics

VanillaPlus: Are CSPs looking to BSS with multi-tenant capabilities to consolidate several businesses onto a single platform? Is this approach recognised as the means to avoid further fragmentation of scattered CSP IT landscapes?

Andreas Opelt, vice president of sales and marketing at InfonovaAndreas Opelt: CSPs have not looked as intensely at this consolidation as you would expect. In the past, just a small percentage of CSPs requested a BSS that was able to consolidate all of their traditional businesses into a single platform. The majority looked for separate stacks for their consumer or enterprise businesses, as well as other businesses like M2M.

When we created the first multi-tenant BSS solution – Infonova´s R6 – we investigated why this recognition and demand on the CSP side was so low and found two main reasons. One is that each BSS stack has an owner and, in times where revenues are being generated adequately, it is easier to leave responsibilities as they are. The other reason is that few were aware that platforms providing this choice were available.

This was not surprising as very few vendors – almost none – offer real multi-tenant capabilities and that meant few CSPs saw a reason to risk consolidation issues when there were no proven solutions out there. Recently things started to change with the availability of platforms like R6 enabling this consolidation and revenues declining massively and necessitating transformation.

Helene Graham: There are several factors that influence the platform that a CSP chooses for BSS but two of the mostHelene Graham, CTO at eircom Group important ones are cost of implementation and time to market during and after the implementation. The part of a BSS implementation that takes time, and requires substantial internal technical resources and that is never out-of-the-box, is the integration into the fulfillment parts of the network and the parts that control inventory.

By choosing a multi-tenant platform this integration only has to be done once for every service, which helps enormously with the implementation. It means that new services can be introduced as required or to all businesses at the same time, which reduces total cost of ownership significantly.

It is very important that the solution for multitenancy offers the different business units the opportunity to work completely independently of each other in terms of how they make the service into a product and proposition for their specific customers. That involves having different product catalogues, eligibility rules and process flows. It is also important for companies like us that commercial and customer information from one tenant are completely protected and cannot be seen or accessed by other tenants.

VP: Do CSPs see the benefits of accelerated time to market from using a pre-integrated end-to-end, concept-to-cash system instead of best of breed siloed systems? How important is time to market to CSPs?

Andreas Gabriel, vice president of product management at infonovaAndreas Gabriel: Time to market has multiple aspects and is definitely a very important factor for CSPs. Almost 80% of the changes to the product portfolio of a CSP deal with refurbishing the existing product portfolio with new charges, promotions and allowances in order to provide new flavours of already available services. Another 15% of the changes deal with more complex updates of the existing product portfolio such as changing usage rate plans or introducing new bundles. An integrated platform like R6 with a central product catalogue allows this flexibility as it enables these types of changes through configuration in the product catalogue.

Only 5% of the changes in the typical product portfolio of a CSP deal with the introduction of new services. Again an integrated concept-to-cash platform like R6 provides a lot of benefits as the system integration work for new services is typically limited to updating the order capture and feasibility rules, integrating the service activation systems and integrating the usage feeds of the service.

HG: Time to market is everything to CSPs both in terms of cost of implementation but also in terms of commercial opportunity. However, time to market is difficult to define and benchmark across operators because it is so individual. In eircom we accept that integration of new services is time consuming and that we should not cut corners when doing this but in reality we don’t introduce new services every day so we can accept longer time to market for this.

However, we introduce new products regularly and it is in this area that we have to be fast and effective. One system for concept-to-cash is the holy grail for a CSP. Having to persist with changes through a multitude of systems is time-consuming and often it means that you have to go for the lowest common denominator across your stack.

VP: What challenges do CSPs face in enabling multiple digital services without the costs spiralling out of control? Is the current strategy of creating a new BSS stack or adjunct system for each new digital service a good decision or are CSPs doing that simply out of necessity?

AO: From what we see in our work with analysts, directly with CSPs but also within innovation catalysts around digital services in TM Forum, CSPs are facing different challenges by entering the so called digital economy. Let’s just mention three of them. First, CSPs are used to selling products based on their traditional services like fixed or mobile voice and data and their organisational structures are designed to support these traditional business models. This suddenly becomes a challenge, when CSPs have to come up with business models or even business cases for a new service portfolio.

Second, there might be stakeholders who come up with these new revenue streams and a wellstructured new business model based on new services – mostly combined with traditional telecoms services. However, they might rather bet a smaller amount of revenue on such an unknown terrain and suddenly face the challenge that the business case is hard to argue. Both options, either building this required new functionality into various different IT legacy systems or buying a new BSS stack for this one new business model, are costly.

Finally, the pressure CSPs’ decision makers face via KPIs and goal setting from shareholders that a certain new business has to be in place by a certain date leads to the unreasonable but understandable decision that a new BSS stack is bought to fulfill promises. This approach is taken even though several further business models are waiting around the corner for their turn to get their BSS requirements fulfilled which would require an overall CSPs strategy for the BSS side of such business models.

HG: I think it is fair to say that it is only in the last couple of years that CSPs have started looking at non-native digital services and where we are all starting to have views about how we would like to address this opportunity only a few of us have embraced it fully. I think this is because CSPs in general were late to realise that this was an opportunity to make a richer offering to our customers and therefore largely let the OTTs take charge in the consumer space.

For eircom one of the key criteria when choosing our platform was that it had to facilitate an easy integration of digital services into the customer interaction lifecycle and that it would make the reconciliation against the third party delivery as easy as possible. We believe that to achieve this, it is crucial to have an architecture that has multitenancy and a sophisticated concept-to-cash framework on the service provider side as well as on the service operator side.

VP: What are the billing and charging features that are really needed to keep up with current and future demands?

AG: Billing and charging is already quite commoditised and most of the platforms out there provide an equal set of complex features with slight variations for the definition of usage and non-usage charges. As there was a trend to very complex products with pricing models depending on multiple factors for telecoms services in the consumer mass market segment over the last decade, the BSS vendors developed a sophisticated toolkit of different charging functions and policies that allow a lot of flexibility in the definition of charging strategies especially for network oriented services.

Nowadays we see an opposite trend towards bundling of multiple different services with simple charging models that are easy to understand and allow the customer to take control of the services and its charges. Pricing is no longer the only differentiator but quality of service gets more and more important. This makes a lot of the complex billing and charging functions obsolete but require flexible bundling and convergent charging functions as well as efficient processes that provide immediate feedback to the customer.

AO: The focus in the future will be on features which allow flexibility in the charging models towards CSPs but also in the billing or settlement required. Other more complex models where one CSP’s service can be sold cheaper in conjunction with, for example, an advertisement service are the sort of demands we are talking about which open new revenue streams and business models for CSPs.

Read morehttp://www.vanillaplus.com/2013/09/13/2441-august-september-2013/

RECENT ARTICLES

Phoenix Tower International gains investment from Grain and BlackRock

Posted on: March 29, 2024

Phoenix Tower International (PTI) has announced that Grain Management (Grain), through its flagship funds, and BlackRock, through a fund managed by its Diversified Infrastructure business (BlackRock) have made an investment

Read more

Connectbase expands baltic connectivity with Bitė partnership

Posted on: March 28, 2024

Connectbase has announced the addition of Bitė to its ecosystem. This partnership marks a step forward in enhancing connectivity options within the Baltic region, providing a link between local and

Read more