The Merriam-Webster of NGOSS

It’s not next; it’s new. It’s not operations support systems; it’s operations software and support. The TeleManagement Forum’s New Generation Operations Software and Support, a framework for solving today’s telecom business and operational issues with software solutions, is the closest thing the industry has to an actual definition of what is loosely termed next-generation OSS. It’s not a standard yet, but if the TMF and its supporters have their way, people will no longer have to ask the question, “What is a next-generation OSS?” Martin Creaner, chief technology officer, TeleManagement Forum:

When NGOSS was created, operators were looking at the whole integration tax they were paying day in and day out to integrate their various systems. They were getting the lowest common denominator of functionality from their COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products and paying $2 to a system integrator for every dollar they were paying for the product in order to get them integrated with their legacy environment. They needed a radically new approach. And that was the rally call for NGOSS.

Initially, people thought that if we could set up a program that defines a handful of clever APIs between systems that would reduce the integration tax, that would do it. And in some respects that’s true; you can handle quite a few point problems just by developing clever interfaces. But if you want to radically revisit the whole challenge of integrating the management infrastructure of an operator, you need to think much broader than that.

One of the biggest problems with integrating COTS applications into legacy environments is the data. What do you do with the data? How do you map the data from one application to another? You spend all your time building adapters and converters for one data model to another. So some standardization around the data model is inherent within your legacy environment. It is a pre-requisite for moving to a stage where you reduce the integration tax.

You have to be able to define your business challenges in a consistent way, your business processes in a consistent way. So you can communicate to your vendors and peer companies using a common language.

So NGOSS grew into this three-legged stool that has at its core a way of standardizing the way we approach business processes, the definition of business processes and the modeling of process flows and standardizing that across the telecommunication environment. The second leg standardizes the way we approach and model data and information in a telecom environment. The third standardizes the architecture approach we take to building OSS and BSS solutions.

We will always have legacy systems. If you put something into an environment today, it becomes legacy by five o’clock this evening. There is no concept of NGOSS being suitable only if you have a greenfield approach. That’s not realistic.

Every operator is sitting there with a huge bit of legacy. And for NGOSS to have any impact in the marketplace, it has to address legacy. That has to be its starting point.

And it takes several years, to gradually evolve the operator’s environment to be an NGOSS environment. You don’t do it in a big bang approach. Large operators will gradually align their OSSs over a five, six, even seven years.

Could I say any one of them has totally swallowed the NGOSS pill and said they are going to implement the whole thing without exception and be religiously fervent about it? I would have to say, no. Every organization is implementing it in a pragmatic sense. They take the parts of NGOSS that meet their immediate needs and are trying to feed it through their organization. They love the idea of a common information model, but the challenge is mapping the legacy information model to a standard information model for the industry. And that’s a huge challenge to get their minds around.

They have gotten what they asked for, which is a robust common information model, now they are facing how to make use of it while continuing to serve customers. That will be where the rubber hits the road over next 12 months.

And over the next six months to 12 months, we will be submitting other aspects of NGOSS to the ITU for formal standardization. Over the next 12 to 24 months, we expect to see the vast majority of NGOSS become an ITU standard. Obviously there is a lot of negotiation to be done. There is certainly nothing promised there.

Overall, there isn’t an operator in the world that doesn’t consider the whole provisioning/inventory management issue as one of the top areas they are going to continue solving over the next 12 months. A second big area that people have moved from talking about to actually doing something about is in service quality management, particularly in the mobile space. QoS is really related to moving from cost control to delighting the customer without necessarily having to throw more money at it. It comes from knowing what the customer is doing and what the services are doing in advance of the customer knowing it.

And a third area has to be revenue assurance, from managing revenue leakage to fraud management. Now, a lot of companies have said ‘Yes, revenue leakage is a big problem—but not for us.’ Nobody wants to admit they have a problem. However, any dollar that you can recover goes straight to the bottom line of the company because you never knew you had it. And the business case that sings the loudest gets the money.--as told to Tim McElligott