OSS for the New IP World

That includes stuff like on-demand and event-based offers that require immediate, accurate provisioning to allow the user to decide when, where and for how long to use these ephemeral services, says Brian Cappellani, CTO at Sigma Systems, a provider of service management OSS solutions.

To that end, Sigma recently launched the Sigma Service Management Platform (SMP) Release 3.0.

The trend toward personalization, which enables the customer to tailor and control his or her service experience, is another challenge of the new world of communications, points out Joe Frost, vice president of marketing at JacobsRimell Ltd., maker of APS (Automated Provisioning System), a customer-centric service fulfillment and management platform that uses the subscriber's identity as the reference point to which to attach products and services. “Our whole architecture is patterned around a subscriber-centric data model that’s shared by all systems,” says Frost. “The customer is an individual, not a telephone number or an address. The service delivery infrastructure, billing and provisioning information must be held in one spot, because you can’t guarantee the delivery of services without a total view of the customer.”

JacobsRimell is bolstering the primacy of the end user by aligning with Round Ltd., to help service providers put the customer in control. Round’s “Customer Centricity” capability assessment, reporting and planning tool, CCDirector, enables cable and telecom operators to prioritize operating and capital investments by assessing more than 60 strands of business capabilities in five areas: business leadership, customer strategy, organization design, information architecture and performance measures. Round recommends the realignment of the provider’s OSS and service fulfillment systems and processes to become more customer-focused, while JacobsRimell delivers on the alignment recommendations.

Of course, the most successful companies are those that can preserve existing customer relationships while layering on new services, notes Chris Thompson, vice president of product management and marketing for Visionael Corp. “Visionael’s view is that today’s service delivery and OSS platforms are unsuited for the IP world.” The new IP services delivery model is one that represents real-time intersection of four systems: a digital rights and policy management system, a billing and customer management system, a service planning and assurance system, and a device and network management system, Thompson says.

If those pieces are absent, customer satisfaction can plummet, he says. “Many times, carriers and service providers don’t even know if they can deliver a particular service to a customer until the order is made, and in many cases, customers have to wait as long as a month. That has to do with carriers and service providers not knowing what is in their complex networks to allow provisioning of new services to their customers.”

Some products tackle this hurdle specifically. For instance, Wisor Telecom Corp., which offers software that streamlines order management and provisioning processes to improve the end-user service fulfillment experience, has launched PortQual. PortQual allows providers to verify the portability of a subscriber’s wireline phone number in real time at initial order entry, by identifying line ownership and barriers to a successful port from one carrier to another.

“In this highly competitive environment, customers migrating to new telecom products want to take current telephone numbers with them,” explains John Murdock, vice president of marketing for Wisor. “Wisor’s PortQual service significantly reduces unanticipated delays in getting the customer’s number ported to the new service provider, resulting in improved process efficiency, decreased expense and improved customer service.”

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