Breaking the silos: transforming OSS/BSS for improved 5G monetization

5G monetization calls for unprecedented agility and flexibility

 

Delivering today’s emerging 5G consumer and enterprise services with a high Quality of Service is putting new pressures and demands on communications service providers (CSPs) on a global scale. The unprecedented complexity of the modern cloud-centric, multi-vendor 5G ecosystem requires heightened agility and flexibility on the part of CSPs and their network fabrics.

Our latest eBrief Breaking down OSS/BSS silos for better 5G monetization, explores how CSPs can ensure the success of their 5G service digital delivery by making sure it is agile and flexible enough to handle the ever-growing volume of transactional demands. Meeting customer expectations requires a network infrastructure that can respond swiftly, efficiently and reliably to their orders and service requests. This necessitates implementing automated, zero-touch processing workflows that rely on a centralized product catalog and cloud operations. 

Why it’s time to break down legacy silos

 

Long-gone are the days when disparate technology stacks and siloed databases could manage everything. In our latest eBrief, Breaking down OSS/BSS silos for better 5G monetization, it becomes evident that it is now time to replace yesterday’s fragmented, legacy application layer with one that is driven by advanced Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) These systems should be powered by open standard frameworks, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and interlinked components tailored to the demands of 5G.

As the eBrief states: “The ability to configure product and service offerings on-the-fly rather than to customize is the key to ensuring agility and flexibility, while minimizing the accumulation of technical debt. Moreover, because BSS and OSS typically reside in multi-vendor, multi-cloud environments, the use of standardized approaches greatly facilitates faster, more robust integration across ecosystems.”

Change can be rapid or gradual: CSPs decide

 

While breaking down legacy siloes offers many valuable benefits and advantages, undergoing this digital transformation is no easy feat. Some CSPs can undertake an end-to-end (E2E) OSS and BSS upgrade, while others may need to incrementally phase in changes towards modernization. The pace of change ultimately depends upon factors like capital budgets, operational demands and the urgency with which improvements are needed. Lost opportunity costs due to inefficiency often justify prioritizing timely capital improvements.

While CSPs may share the same goal of unifying key processes such as core commerce, orchestration, monetization and data and analytics for 5G—their transformation journeys may differ based on unique operational needs, budgets and timetables. To illustrate this point, we examine the respective 5G monetization strategies of two industry leading CSPs: Telia Company, Sweden and Telstra Corporation Ltd, Australia.

How Telia is elevating its customer service experience

 

Without disrupting their daily operational obligations, Telia has been implementing a massive, multi-year, ground-up network restructuring to centralize and standardize its technology platform across multiple Nordic and Baltic countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

With this technology overhaul, Telia is poised to enhance and personalize the customer experience for its more than 18.3 million mobile subscribers, as well as millions of TV, broadband and fixed voice customers.

 

Telia’s ultimate solution architecture is illustrated in figure 1

 

According to the TM Forum case study, Telia’s OSS/BSS evolution toward 5G digital service delivery, “Telia has put into place an ambitious transformation plan to create a new digital service ecosystem. Success, however, will depend heavily on its ability to overhaul its legacy BSS and OSS and associated operational practices. As telcos around the world can attest…this is no minor challenge.”

Compared to its siloed databases approach, which was error-prone, Telia’s new architecture enables faster, more accurate, and zero-touch automated execution of the following processes:

 

Source: Ericsson

For more details, please refer to the Ericsson case study: Telia: BSS/OSS for automated 5G digital service delivery.

Telstra’s multi-faceted transformation journey

Telstra’s modernization of its underlying network infrastructures better supports both its prepaid commerce and multi-domain service orchestration. A case study by Ericsson, entitled Telstra Prepaid Transformation, tells how the company embarked on a 10-month-long transformation of the core commerce aspect of its prepaid business by implementing Ericsson Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Ericsson Charging, among other Ericsson products.

As a result, Telstra’s prepaid business now has direct access to resources such as its centralized commercial catalog for front-end and back-end processing. This has resulted in reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and activation times, improved time-to-market (TTM) and customer experience.

In Breaking down OSS/BSS silos for better 5G monetization, Telstra explains, “Siloed legacy applications were preventing Telstra from responding to new opportunities. This inflexibility needed to be addressed to reduce costs and decrease the time required to complete business processes in the pursuit of increased revenues and profitability.”

Telstra's multi-domain service orchestration solution, developed in collaboration with Ericsson, highlights the significance of composite orchestration in delivering hybrid services through NaaS architecture. By virtualizing and consolidating networks and services into a dynamic and automated workflow, Telstra achieves numerous benefits.

Additionally, the TM Forum's Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) framework empowers Ericsson applications to seamlessly operate across multiple OSS and BSS stacks, as well as third-party ecosystems.

 

As a result of this investment, Telstra now experiences many benefits, including faster TTM, reduced operating costs, 100 percent autonomy for its OSS and BSS services and up to seven days shorter order fulfillment times.

How can CSPs maximize the agility of their OSS and BSS layers?

 

Given the complexity of 5G’s advanced enterprise and consumer services, as well as the multiple vendor and partner relationships involved, a modernized network infrastructure must integrate open industry standard frameworks, APIs, and other “digital glue” (interoperability solutions) needed to hold the dynamic workflow together.

To successfully implement zero-touch automation across the ecosystem, CSPs like Telia and Telstra, are pulling together a wide array of cloud, hardware, and software components, including those shown in figure 4, below.

Business Support Systems (BSS) software	TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA)	Industry-standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and frameworks	DevOps Tools and Methodologies for in-house IT software development
Operations Support Systems (OSS) software	Cloud and edge computing	Artificial Intelligence (AI)	Machine Learning (ML)

 

These are the modern technology components that CSPs can incorporate into their upgraded workflows to replace their limited legacy systems and siloed databases.

Are you ready to evolve your OSS/BSS workflows?

 

Legacy technology systems that are isolated in silos face significant challenges in meeting the demands of 5G and delivering the performance customers expect. When systems cannot communicate or interoperate with each other, it can lead to bottlenecks and inefficiencies, resulting in poor user experience.

To achieve agile and flexible service creation and optimize customer experience, it is necessary to adopt new ways of working that unify core commerce, orchestration, monetization, as well as data and analytics, to enable them to operate efficiently as one.  

Ultimately, shifting to advanced, automated BSS and OSS is required to reduce costs, TTM, and, more importantly, time to revenue for new product offerings. Realizing operational benefits and a timely return on investment (ROI) by CSPs requires, adopting agile new ways of working to build, manage and operate in an automated, centralized manner that runs efficiently, minimizes risk, and fully monetizes 5G investments.

 

Read more: 

Download the Breaking down OSS/BSS silos for better 5G monetization eBrief

Read the Telstra Prepaid Transformation case study

Read the Telia BSS/OSS for automated 5G digital service delivery case study

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Read more about 5G monetization to improve top line revenue capture

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Closing the loop: CSPs aim to automate service orchestration and assurance - Ericsson