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Business and Operations Support Systems

Sell. Deliver. Get paid.

OSS (Operations Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems) are the backbone of a communications service provider’s operations and business management.

OSS keeps your services running smoothly behind the scenes. It manages service orchestration, assurance, and everything that ensures your network works as it should. BSS is the business engine. It handles billing, charging, mediation, and order management – making sure you can sell, deliver, and get paid for your services.

Even though OSS and BSS do different jobs, they work hand in hand. Together, they connect your technology with your business goals.

Today, the telecom world is moving toward autonomous networks and smarter connectivity. Transforming OSS/BSS is essential to making that happen. The right solutions break down data silos, simplify complex processes, and replace outdated systems. This means you can act faster, innovate more, and serve your customers better.

A modern OSS/BSS is agile, data-driven, and ready for the future. It uses trusted data, AI-powered automation, scalable cloud infrastructure, and flexible service orchestration. It converts technology into revenue and keeps evolving so you’re always prepared for what’s next.

Mapping the OSS/BSS transformation journey: Accelerate innovation and commercial success

Identify the most effective pathways for modernizing OSS/BSS to support the shift toward high performing programmable networks. Read the IDC infobrief.

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Traditionally, OSS and BSS have operated in silos, leading to inefficiencies, delayed service rollouts, and fragmented customer experiences. In today's competitive telecommunications landscape, CSPs must integrate these systems cohesively to enhance agility, improve customer satisfaction, and expedite the launch of new services.

However, legacy OSS/BSS systems present significant challenges, particularly with the advent of 5G technology. Overcoming these obstacles requires technical upgrades and a fundamental shift in technology and organizational culture. Understanding these challenges is crucial for CSPs aiming to modernize and integrate their OSS/BSS systems effectively.

Lack of standardization and customization

Traditional OSS/BSS systems are heavily customized, leading to a fragmented series of bespoke integrations that can be difficult to standardize or update. This lack of interoperability creates inefficiencies, slowing operations and making it challenging for CSPs to innovate or scale effectively.

Siloed systems and bottlenecks

Legacy systems often operate in isolation, with limited communication between them. This siloed setup disrupts data flow, creates operational bottlenecks, and slows service delivery. These inefficiencies become increasingly problematic as CSPs scale their operations and strive to meet the demands of 5G.

5G and the data explosion

5G introduces new challenges, such as managing vast volumes of data and supporting dynamic network slicing, which traditional systems cannot handle. Legacy OSS/BSS architectures lack the flexibility and real-time capabilities required for modern billing, service orchestration, and data management, limiting CSPs' ability to fully leverage 5G opportunities.

The future of OSS/BSS lies in fully integrated, intelligent, and adaptable platforms that can keep pace with the telecom industry's evolution toward 5G, IoT, and increasingly hyperconnected ecosystems.

As we transition from traditional connectivity to digital service platforms at the center of expansive partner ecosystems, success will depend on our ability to enable seamless collaboration with third-party developers. To thrive in this ecosystem, it is also crucial to integrate partner marketplaces and adopt innovative pricing and bundling strategies suited to complex, multisided business models.

To drive this transformation, OSS/BSS systems are evolving beyond their traditional, siloed roles and become unified, end-to-end operational and business ecosystems. This evolution is not merely a technological upgrade. It represents a strategic reinvention of the business, unifying operational and commercial functions into a single, adaptive, data-driven digital nervous system.

A unified OSS/BSS ecosystem

A unified OSS/BSS ecosystem is critical for eliminating the friction that historically occurred between disparate systems.

By aligning operational and business processes, such as service provisioning, billing, order management, and customer support, you can ensure smooth workflows, consistent data flows, and faster time-to-market for new offerings.

The convergence of OSS and BSS enables a single source of truth across the organization, reducing duplication of effort, improving customer satisfaction, and strengthening brand trust.

Openness and flexibility

Modern OSS/BSS platforms are embracing openness and flexibility to operate effectively in multi-vendor, hybrid environments. This involves adopting cloud-native architectures and supporting multiple deployment models – on-premises, hybrid, or fully cloud-based – depending on business needs, regulatory constraints, and current IT landscapes.

By building with open APIs and supporting industry frameworks like the TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA), you can achieve faster integrations, promote interoperability, and reduce the costs associated with connecting diverse systems.

Intelligence-driven systems

Future OSS/BSS must be intelligence-driven. The integration of AI, machine learning, and real-time analytics will enable proactive decision-making, predictive maintenance, personalized customer experiences, and dynamic service orchestration

This intelligence strengthens operational agility and opens new revenue opportunities, particularly in emerging sectors such as smart cities, manufacturing automation, and connected healthcare.

Unlock greater intelligence and innovation in OSS/BSS with a unified cloud, data and AI platform

Discover how a unified cloud, data, and AI platform can unlock greater intelligence, operational agility, and innovative 5G services for your business. Accelerate your OSS/BSS transformation today.

Read the Analysys Mason report

Omdia report: The Future of OSS/BSS is cloud-based and AI-native

Discover how the future of OSS/BSS is being transformed by cloud and AI technologies in this insightful report from Omdia.

Read the Omdia report

OSS/BSS Transformation - The road to agentic AI

Make progress on your OSS/BSS transformational ambitions with cloud and AI central to your success.

Read the Appledore report

Silobreakers

Sunrise aerial view of Sydney with harbour bridge Australia

Richard Kendall, Executive General Manager of Architecture at nbn Co

Richard Kendall shares how the wholesale provider balances rapid network rollout, multiple access technologies, and social purpose, while overcoming the challenges of modernizing services in a complex and expansive national network.

Read the interview

Markus Kinnunen, CIO of Elisa

Markus Kinnunen believes that a long-term commitment to continuous innovation and the re-utilization of telecom IT, with a staged simplification of a complex brownfield IT environment, is key to transforming telecom technology into efficient and scalable digital services.

Read the interview

Top of a telecom tower with antennas and dishes against blue sky.

Carlos Palito, CIO of Entel

Carlos Palito explains how the 68-year-old company has put earlier failed attempts at digital transformation behind it to realize the rewards of Entel 3.0— a clearly defined, unified transformation strategy across fixed and mobile operations in Chile and Peru.

Read the interview

A couple in the foreground looking at a colorfully decorated wall with screens.

Nikos Angelopoulos, Group CIO of MTN Group

Nikos Angelopoulos believes that close, cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders—across central teams, business units, and operating companies—is essential to the success of multinational operators such as MTN.

Read the interview

AT&T - Enterprise Next Gen services monetization: Enabling IoT offering innovation

Cameron Coursey
VP Connected Solutions
AT&T

BT Group - Delivering AI-Native Telco: Opportunities and use cases

Gabriela Styf Sjöman
Managing Director Research and Networks Strategy
BT Group

DT Germany - Service observability in the Telco Cloud: Ensuring transparency and vitality

Marcus Müller
VP Lab & Automation
DT Germany

Experience the highlights from OSS/BSS Summit 2025

Step into the future of OSS/BSS evolution with the key insights, innovations, and discussions that shaped the OSS/BSS Summit 2025. This year’s event brought together visionary leaders, CSPs, and industry analysts to explore how autonomous networks, data-driven intelligence, and next-generation monetization models are redefining real business outcomes across OSS/BSS.

Discover more

How AI takes OSS/BSS to the next level

AI and machine learning are transforming operations and enhancing business processes.

Within OSS and BSS, AI can be applied in various ways, including network performance optimization, predictive maintenance, intelligent resource allocation, fraud detection, and personalized customer experiences.

The emerging field of Gen-AI brings additional capabilities by producing new outputs such as data-driven reports, automated network visualizations, dynamic simulations, and context-aware virtual assistants, and leverages patterns learned from existing datasets.

These advancements help streamline workflows, reduce operational costs, and drive innovation across telecommunications ecosystems.

eBrief: Maximize OSS/BSS impact with Al and Gen-AI

eBrief: Artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation

eBrief: Transform invoice anomaly detection with AI smart encoders

Tree growing inside a cave, reaching toward sunlight above.

Omdia: Driving AI enhanced business growth

Autonomous networks are transforming operations by using AI and automation to make decisions, learn, and adapt without human input. They respond to changes in real time, based on defined business and operational intents.

With their advanced capabilities, they pave the way for reduced complexity, improved efficiency, and flexible, scalable service delivery, enabling you to meet customer demands and adapt quickly to new opportunities.

With curated data and AI/ML models, you can achieve zero-touch operations and deliver advanced services, even in multi-vendor environments.

Service orchestration is key to achieving higher levels of autonomy. It combines intent management, assurance, real-time inventory, and closed-loop automation powered by agentic AI.

The strong link between autonomous networking and orchestration creates efficient, intelligent, and adaptive connectivity ecosystems that are ready for the future.

Explore autonomous networks

Evolve OSS/BSS as you progress toward autonomous networks

Appledore: Moving towards intelligent platforms - The new role of OSS/BSS

OSS/BSS must be repositioned not as back-office systems, but as engines of growth, monetization, and customer engagement.

Read the Appledore report

Prefer to read the insights? Download the TM forum report, IT with intent: the interconnected future of telco operations.

TM forum report - IT with intent: the interconnected future of telco operations

Discover how the telecom industry is undergoing a dual paradigm shift from traditional IT operating models to intent-based autonomous operations, all powered by 5G programmability and AI-driven networks, and the critical role OSS/BSS plays in enabling this transformation.

Access the full TM Forum webinar featuring Jason Keane (Head of OSS/BSS portfolio, Ericsson) and Mark Sanders (Chief Architect, Telstra) for deeper industry insights on the road to intent-based operations.

This interview explores five critical OSS/BSS transformation areas shaping the future:

Unlocking the true value of data
Building intelligent AI-driven applications
Streamlining service orchestration
Crafting flexible commercial models
Deploying unified charging and billing systems

Watch the Webinar

Business and Operations Support Systems portfolio visualization

Core Commerce, Orchestration, Monetization, Data and AI, Cloud and IT Services

We deliver future-proof, open, and standards-based OSS/BSS solutions that help you capitalize on 5G opportunities while enabling you to reduce time to revenue and minimize risk through a stepwise approach.

In a dynamic telecommunications world, we enhance these capabilities with new features, combining the power of data, AI, cloud, and IT modernization across commerce, service orchestration, and monetization to empower your business.

Our no-nonsense approach cuts through the hype to unlock the full potential of autonomous networks and differentiated connectivity.

Explore our solutions

Core Commerce

Support consistent and contextual catalog-driven omni-channel experience powered by intuitive journeys.

Service orchestration

Dynamically manage service orchestration. Enable zero-touch order to activation workflows.

Monetization

Monetize new revenue streams while offering increased value to end consumers and enterprises.

Data and AI

Drive insights to business outcomes with real-time, multivendor data processing, analytics and AI/ML.

OSS/BSS: Cloud and IT Services

With our OSS/BSS services, you can orchestrate new experiences, monetize smarter, and embrace the cloud. That means delivering unique services your customers love, unlocking the potential of 5G, and adapting easily when things change.

We know old models slow you down. That’s why we help you shift to approaches that bring real-time agility and measurable results. Together, we make it easier for your business to run, and to keep running in the era of autonomous networks.

We keep it simple, so you can focus on what matters: delivering great services, faster.

Explore our services

Navigate your journey to successful IT transformation

Capturing 5G value through automated orchestration journeys

Your cloud transformation journeys underpin effective innovation

Transform monetization in the 5G and autonomous network era

Read about the transformative steps and strategies many of our OSS/BSS customers take. These leaders share their efforts to remain competitive and responsive to dynamic market conditions, while successfully powering progress and monetizing 5G capital investments.