Fulfilling the IP Service Promise

As much as customers might like to complain about their local telco, you'd be hard-pressed finding any customer who could grumble too much about getting basic phone service turned on. That's because the so-called fulfillment systems responsible for getting basic voice service running in a TDM world — from order entry to inventory management to service activation — are all extremely mature and well-functioning. They were born, bred and managed to get this straightforward, if complex, job done.

But with the coming of more IP-based networks — and the proliferation of the IP-based services applications, content and services they enable — telecom service providers face a major challenge on the fulfillment front. They need new processes and platforms to turn up not only voice services, including new voice-over-IP (VoIP) offerings, but the whole quadruple play of voice, data, video and wireless and beyond — not to mention deliver altogether new things such as video content, security and data backup services, a wide array of applications, and more.

Automating such a complex, multiservice order-to-activation flow is extremely challenging. But service providers won't be able to make money on these typically lower-margin bundles of services unless they can automate their delivery with as few order dropouts and costly manual interventions as possible.

It's a big undertaking, but understanding the scope of this challenge actually opens up more questions than it answers: Should old fulfillment systems be retired completely, or somehow integrated into new processes? Should new IP-centric fulfillment processes ride on entirely new systems? Should those new systems aim to be horizontal in nature — spanning multiple services and processes — or should they start on a siloed basis, perhaps adding additional services one by one? Or is it better to take an altogether different route, essentially creating a new layer of software that spans and ties together the old systems and processes and the new?

It's a multiservice world

The introduction of IP technology certainly brings unique challenges. Session initiation protocol (SIP) applications and endpoints (i.e., phones) bring new capabilities to the game that must be managed at the subscriber, service and device levels. Indeed, provisioning and activation has been the primary bottleneck in deploying very simple, first generation me-too VoIP services, said Preston Gilmer, vice president of product marketing for OSS vendor Sigma Systems.

But the real challenge with IP is the wide breadth of possible services, applications and devices the technology enables — it's a multiservice world, baby.

“Telcos [have traditionally been] more apt to deploy a separate [operations support system] service fulfillment system to solve a specific business problem or initiative that is IP-enabled,” Gilmer said. “However, as VoIP and IPTV service offerings become more prevalent, and triple-play bundling and converged services are required, this will have to change.”

The service picture, of course, extends well beyond triple play to a broad array of new services that need to be delivered. “Service providers are facing a number of challenges, the biggest being just the sheer scale of what they are trying to achieve in rolling out a huge number of new services out the door,” said Cassandra Millhouse, director of product marketing for Amdocs. “They are desperately trying to reduce the product creation cycle — the length of time it takes to introduce new services.”