Evolving your BSS to the cloud: a business case

There is no doubt that 5G is already shaking up our industry and fast becoming a platform for major innovation.. This is true not only for the regular  consumer mobile business, but also for the growing  5G and IoT opportunities for enterprises in different verticals that will benefit from increased bandwidth, lower latencies, unmatched agility and co-creation ecosystems. Even when we thought that COVID-19 would slow down  5G implementation around the world, the exact opposite happened: connectivity needs exploded, and expectations heightened to a whole new level. Working from home, the increasing popularity of streaming services and telemedicine, for example, brought new and unexpected traffic growth – putting added pressure on communication service providers. Subscribers – both consumers and enterprise – are demanding better network quality and customer experience, along with innovative new services. And they are willing to pay a premium for them. That´s where telecom BSS, and its evolution to the cloud, becomes a vital cog in the global communications machine.BSS is at the heart of monetization and the delivery of profitable services, so it’s no surprise that 5G implementation and BSS evolution to the cloud are intrinsically linked. The message is clear: it’s time to start your BSS transformation now.

Profitable services in the 5G era demand cloud BSS

For communication service providers to thrive in this digital economy, it is mandatory that their BSS also evolves to support the new revenue and cost models emerging alongside 5G services. There are new agility, flexibility, resiliency and availability requirements that are very costly to achieve with the BSS architecture that served previous generations of network technologies. This is due to years of legacy, customization and complexity built in a monolithic architecture. Only by evolving to a cloud architecture will BSS be an enabler of the new B2B, B2C and B2B2X business models that deliver profitable services to customers. At the same time, cloud BSS architecture allows service providers to revolutionize their customer experience, through accelerated automation, open y, and the simpler way it makes data available for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. In another recent blog post, I already touched on what the cloud BSS journey looks like and the principles behind the evolution of BSS to a cloud architecture. But I missed a critical question: When does this evolution start?

5G core and BSS must walk hand-in-hand

Even though the lights are shining on 5G radio and core as the key elements for launching 5G, service providersmust take into consideration that business support systems are  the cash register of their business. That´s where they will create, manage, share and monetize the new 5G services that will turn into profit – IoT, edge, consumer, enterprise, and co-creation. It means that BSS evolution to cloud must be taken into consideration along with 5G implementation, so service providers are able to launch new profitable applications with the agility, efficiency and low-cost needed to succeed in this new business environment. Research Expert and Analyst, Ron Westfall from Futurum Research wrote a very interesting article about how service providers can take advantage of cloud capabilities in BSS.

But if you want a straightforward answer to that critical question, here it goes: if it hasn’t already started, the BSS evolution to cloud must start now! And if it has already started, keep going until cloud really delivers on its promises.

Further reading

A day in the life of a Telecom BSS engineer: cloud and culture

A Day in the Life of a Telecom BSS Engineer: Public Cloud, are you there yet?

Read more about Telecom BSS