Product managers and marketing cannot manage converged services with legacy tools

Bill Cannon, VP of strategic sales for Monolith Software, cuts directly to the chase when discussing service provider’s back-office integration challenges: “In the OSS/BSS space, software is like religion; if you tell someone they have to replace or rip out something, their hair turns white and they run out of the building.”

Monolith, which demonstrated its Unified Presentation Layer solution for service level management for the cable video service level management catalyst at Management World Orlando, aims to ease those integration blues with its “multi-screen” approach to service management.

Indeed, most Communications Service Providers (CSPs) recognize from an operational standpoint that managing “converged” solutions means the ultimate destruction of silos, “which make it more difficult to manage services than to actually provision them,” said Cannon, noting that it is product managers and marketers that drive management decisions now, as opposed to IT and engineering. Because these types of people in service-provider organizations are pressured to create services built with multiple products and providers either inside or outside an organization, the layers of applications and services for video, SMS, VoiP, etc are becoming an enormous tangled mess to manage.

Most high-end carriers today have to manage six or more screens because they lack a consolidated platform for managing availability, performance, fault, service-level management and dashboarding. Without an effective multi-screen service management strategy, most Communications Service Providers today grapple with a complex blend of proprietary and vendor-created point solutions. “That makes it difficult for them to bridge the gap between two worlds—the legacy telco systems implemented years or even decades ago, and state-of-the-art systems for today’s advanced data services. They are stuck with multiple instances of software and multitudes of integration points to manage,” said Cannon.

Whether it’s multiple homegrown OSS tools and multiple instances of CA or HP, or Netcool or SMARTS, Tivoli or Infovista or any other number of best-in-breed tools that became the “standard” over the years, the bottom line is operators are challenged to achieve operational efficiencies and open up dashboards to enterprise and individual customers, not to mention a growing number of third parties with whom they partner. This challenge is only growing in light of increasing acquisitions and moves by CSPs to do more in the enterprise space and other adjacent markets. “If an operator buys a CLEC, a residential carrier and other ‘islands’ of assets, they only grow the problem of how to normalize data and drive operational efficiency,” added Cannon.

If the goal is a reduction of NOCs and tools, and how to abstract data out for “sticky applications” that offer competitive advantage, the question is how to tie it all together so that CSPs become operationally efficient, and at the same time “customer intimate.”

According to Cannon, service providers need to try to work directly with the element management systems and phase out gradually “all the stuff in the middle.” To normalize data into a unified structure, service providers must first figure out how to take northbound feeds and normalize data over time. “We believe this depends heavily on whether they have a single service-assurance database and the ability to use service metrics for visualizing data, and the ability to enrich data for correlations, notifications and escalations inherent in event and performance management,” said Cannon. He believes inevitably, CSPs will work to phase out the integration points they currently manage so that they can have everything in a single database that manages devices, EMSs and OSS/BSS. “You want to either normalize data from existing systems and tie to them, or you want to slowly phase them out—either way, the key is to have a single database, and extrapolate from that so you can reduce operational costs and improve the ability to abstract data out to dashboards useful to your own people and those with whom you partner and sell services,” said Cannon.

He believes service providers will go through what he calls the “death of distance” they experienced years ago with networks, but now with IT—driven by cloud computing, which drives economies and operational efficiencies. “That’s why now we will see more ‘gravity’ to optimize IT, like they did with networks. Now you can buy a single box with a terabyte of data rather than an entire data center, and so the momentum will build to truly converge services devices, and OSS/BSS.”