Front Page - The New Ghosts in the Machine

Posted 01/15//2001

Front Page

The New Ghosts in the Machine
Carriers Embrace Back-Office Automation
By Chris Garifo

In an attempt to better serve customers while driving down costs, carriers are increasingly moving to a hands-off approach to OSS.

North American Telecom (www.natelco.net), a facilities-based CLEC headquartered in Westbury, N.Y., is just one of the many carriers that is moving toward full back-office automation. In 1999, North American Telecom bought MetaSolv Software Inc.'s (www.metasolv.com) Telecom Business Solution (TBS), an automated ordering and provisioning solution that has become one of the leaders in the OSS automation marketplace.

"[Our back office now is] tremendously automated--everything goes through TBS," says Vincent Ciro, North American Telecom's director of OSS planning and implementation. "Like every other new CLEC, we had stacks and stacks and stacks of paper. No more of that. Everything is mechanized."

Ciro says North American Telecom's motivation to automate was based on "being able to reduce our errors and improve service to our customers."

He adds that the decisions to automate and which vendors to go with were difficult, partially because the move toward automation is still in its infancy.

In addition to automating its internal ordering and provisioning, North American Telecom has also automated its connection with Verizon, establishing an e-bonding gateway using a solution from DSET Corp. (www.dset.com). That gateway received its test certification in October and was expected to become operational this month.

Searching for the "Holy Grail"

MetaSolv and another vendor, Telution Inc. (www.telution.com), say that they will be able to offer customers a back office that will be fully automated for flow-through transactions, a scenario that A.J. Germek, co-founder and COO of OSS solutions provider GuideComm Systems Inc. (www.guidecom.net), calls "the holy grail of the industry for the last five or 10 years."

Germek says the number-one stumbling block to achieving that has been legacy systems.

"Basically, the systems that were designed in the past and that had been added to and modified over time never anticipated all the technology changes and shifts that we have," Germek says.

Incumbent carriers with their embedded bases of systems just weren't able to keep up with the technology because of the difficulties inherent in a shift to a newer system, such as the migration of huge volumes of information.

New carriers also were slow to embrace some of the new technology because they were more focused on establishing their networks and building a customer base.

"Up until lately, it really hasn't been that attractive to spend a lot of time and money on your [OSS]," Germek says, adding that time, more than money, was the major factor. He says that early on, CLECs were being judged on how well they were able to build out their networks and get customers.

On top of all that, the idea of OSS automation is still very new.

"This market didn't exist four or five years ago because the incumbents were building and modifying their own software, so you didn't have a robust third-party market for developing and selling software," Germek says, adding that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 "deregulated the marketplace and created an opportunity for a lot of new software vendors."

Now that there's a realization of the benefits of OSS automation, however, actually executing it is a challenge because of the limited availability of and high premiums for technical help, he says.

"Basically, there's been over 2,000 CLECs that registered since 1996," Germek explains. "The equipment makers and the venture capitalists have provided a tremendous amount of capital to start new CLECs and new businesses. So, where there were 20 or 30 companies operating, now you have 200 or 300 companies operating, and you don't generate knowledgeable IS people at the same rate that you can buy and install equipment. So, basically you take the pool of available talent and you dilute it over 10 times as many customers as you need to build these things."

And not every CLEC approaches the issue the same way.

"Different service providers have different philosophies," says Russell Rothstein, vice president of strategic development at software developer HarmonyCom (www.harmonycom.com). "There are some service providers that want to build the thing with the best, optimal OSS infrastructure from day one. And then there are the ones who are more conservative, who say 'let's automate the pieces step by step' ... based on the real need they have at the moment."

Automation Tries to Rescue DSL

One need only look at the fiasco that DSL provisioning has become for many providers to see the reasons that automation is desperately needed by carriers. DSL has been taking weeks, and even months, to provision; and many customers have been told they can get it, only to find weeks and three or four truck rolls later that a mistake had been made, and now they can't get it. That kind of scenario is a perfect recipe for churn, a fatal issue for any carrier, especially one starting out in the market.

Chart: Automating the Back Office

That situation has provided the impetus for a slew of new products that have hit the market the past year to speed up and increase the efficiency of the DSL ordering and provisioning process to save the industry from itself (for more on DSL, see "Taking the Next Steps: DSL Mass Market Deployment and SLAs").

Charles E. Crenshaw, CEO and president of Connexn Technologies Inc. (www.cnnxn.com), a Colorado-based software developer that specializes in integrating and automating business processes, explains that part of the problem with DSL provisioning is that it has two major pieces. He says one part of that is the physical installation of the hardware, which can't be automated and typically is performed by an outside services company.

"That in and of itself makes it more difficult because there's just a lot more coordination that it has to go through than in what you would think of as a normal, old-style voice application where all of the infrastructure is basically already there," Crenshaw says. Because the DSL infrastructure isn't necessarily in place, mistakes can happen regarding whether the end user really can get the service.

Once the physical infrastructure is in place, the automation becomes relatively easy, Crenshaw says. However, DSL is still a very new service and "this has come along so fast, the business process is probably lagging more than you would expect," Crenshaw says.

Companies such as NightFire Software Inc. (www.nightfire.com), Eftia OSS Solutions Inc. (www.eftia.com) and DSET have all rolled out products designed to automate the DSL provisioning process.

DSL, however, isn't the only area that is being automated. Glen Hellman, vice president of 3Com Corp.'s (www.3com.com) Carrier Networks Business OSS unit, says companies like his are "trying to build back-office systems that are black boxes." Those black boxes control practically every aspect of the back office, including billing, order management, customer care, provisioning, inventory management, sales-force management and other functions.

"If you've got the right infrastructure in the back, then you can turn the service on more quickly--you can turn it on instantly," Hellman says. "And if you've got the right back-end infrastructure, if you've got the right inventory, if you understand the network topology, and if you really can relate to the network topology, you can get to this concept of zero-touch frictionless provisioning."

CLECs are going to have to be patient about the whole process, however. No single vendor as yet has a solution that can completely automate the entire back office. That means multiple vendors will be required and, subsequently, the various systems will have to be integrated. That will take time and a lot of effort, in a marketplace that considers time-to-market of paramount importance.

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