Service Assurance: Blended Services Present Fulfillment Challenges

Subscribers may want multimedia to be accessible across devices and networks, but that presents some back-office challenges for service providers. With IMS still years away, the lack of automated provisioning platforms to ensure a quality experience for the customer has constricted operators’ ability to bring multinetwork services to market. Now, OSS companies are responding.

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“We see a lot of interest in IMS because of what it promises to deliver,” says Cassandra Millhouse, product marketing manager for Amdocs Ltd., which recently has been focusing on pre-configuring the automation of multinetwork fulfillment processes. “But as the realization dawns about the level of investment required to move to IMS, they are just taking baby steps towards that vision. But they still need to support multinetwork services, and they must ensure that subscriber orders are accurate and that the services work the way they should.”

Amdocs' Cassandra Millhouse

As the bundle starts to expand to include the blending of multiple services and the layering on top of new types of content, the problem explodes, says David Sharpley, vice president of marketing and alliances at Oracle Corp.’s Oracle Communications. “Business intelligence and analytics are thus becoming an OSS trend because it’s all about completing the perfect order,” he says. “Completing the order and getting it fulfilled and up and running in an automated fashion is the key element of the customer experience. But with so much complexity and so many silos, a service provider is even further challenged to get a total view of the process.” In tandem, the customer needs to be able to order and take accurate delivery of applications and content almost instantaneously.

It’s also a question of redefining procedures and policies. “In order for operators to turn up services, make them reusable, bundle them up, then deliver them to any device over any network in real time, they have to abstract those services from the networks,” says Preston Gilmer, vice president of product marketing at Sigma Systems, which provides operators with a unified view of the subscriber across services and devices via its All Play architecture. “You can do that in the service creation environment, but you have to drive a common set of processes and procedures, with a unified API environment no matter where the order is captured, and a number of other best practices need to be implemented. It’s an institutional challenge.”

What most providers are doing now is a manual affair, where a team carries out fulfillment, checks for QoS, and looks at the availability to the device, bandwidth capacity, credit approvals and so on, says Millhouse. “This can take three to four weeks,” she explains. “But with the customer driving the service order experience now that we‘re getting to transactional content and porting of data, operators are going to have to make a move to automated tools.”

Sharpley says another key industry challenge is order-change management. If a customer orders the quad play, for example, and decides to upgrade the bandwidth from 256kbps to 512kbps while the first order is still in process, most service providers are unable to quickly make a revision. Often, the first order is provisioned, then canceled, and the change is treated as an entirely new order. As a result, order accuracy suffers.

Fortunately, there are more and more OSS systems that can help streamline these stumbling blocks and help assure the quality of experience of the subscriber. An operator can leverage analytic tools, for instance, to grab data from various points in the networks to build a picture of what’s happening with a service, so it proactively can address bottlenecks or other issues.

Oracle recently launched its Order and Service Management product aimed at assuaging these issues. The platform takes the quality of experience and provisioning requirements from the different relevant sources and manages the process from order capture to fulfillment.

Axiom Systems is taking a similar approach. “It’s a big struggle to take traditional workflows and make them fit new services,” says Jason Grant, head of pre-sales at Axiom, maker of the Active Catalog fulfillment and activation platform. “Rather than have large monolithic workflows for each service end to end, we’ve decided to break them down into their component parts, so when you go to assemble a service, the system knows which components to use to build it, and it’s all automated.”

The latest version of Axiom’s Active Catalog takes various product catalogs and performs a discovery function to determine each service’s requirements. “We then import that and use it to create common components that can be reused for any service,” says Grant. Catalogs can be internal or from third parties, and the system orchestrates the delivery and makes sure security, QoS and other policies are enforced.”

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