Management World: Cloud and analytics drive back-office directions

Orlando - Clouds and analytics were central themes at this week’s Management World Americas event in Orlando. OSS/BSS suppliers consistently stated that they are seeing increasing demand from operators for cloud-based solutions across many OSS/BSS functional areas as well as calls for more granular and domain-specific analytics capabilities.

Tribold CEO Simon Muderack noted that the centralized product catalog concept that his company pioneered has become widely accepted in the industry, attracting multiple competitors into the space. Well capitalized, with backing from heavyweights like Intel Capital, Tribold is remaining ahead of the curve with significant investments in R&D to continue to refine its solution. Muderack notes the company recently opened a new on-shore R&D center in South Wales, UK with incentives from the Welsh government.

The company has productized key capabilities like the complex processes involved in bringing data from multiple disparate systems into the catalog, which in turns helps drive the ability to deliver solutions rapidly, in incremental chunks that deliver value at each step, and at Tier 1 scale. Muderack says that now, with so much interest in cloud-based options, customers like TeliaSonera have actively encouraged Tribold to provide a hosted product catalog delivered from the cloud, which is a new twist on cloud-based OSS.

Similarly, Netformx is expanding its requirements-to-order offering (CP: Sprint, Netformx speak at MW Dublin about automating ordering and provisioning) toward cloud and SaaS-based options, but is also seeing a bump in value for its offerings from enterprises’ moving more of their IT infrastructure into the cloud. Netformx is empowering companies like AT&T, which stood up for Netformx at the event, to automate the requirements generation, RFP and bidding processes for large enterprise network clients. John Breen, AVP for AT&T’s Solution Center of Excellence, says Netformx is helping AT&T’s customer-facing organization to ensure that requirements translate into a valid architecture; that the right products are being offered to each customer; to minimize costly errors in the ordering process; and to auto-discover customers’ existing network states as they define go-forward requirements enterprise networks.

Netformx COO Steve Bamberger says that people often think of “moving to the cloud…as the absence of doing things” but adds that the opposite is true. Where enterprises can get into trouble is when they overlook the new, more demanding requirements their cloud-centric IT strategies place on their campus and backhaul networks. Netformx is helping AT&T to identify and address those kinds of issues proactively.

In a similar vein, Subex’s John Brooks says his company is evolving beyond its base in core revenue assurance and fraud management capabilities to drive more domain-specific applications. He says the entire ROC concept has evolved, from the original introduction of Subex’s ROCware product offerings, to deliver a true ROC, as originally envisioned, with a unified operational view that leverages Subex’s analytics capabilities to “propel actionable intelligence from the ROC into the business” to solve actual and specific problems.

He notes that the term “analytics” itself is broadly defined. Too often it is a catch all approach to crunching data from all around the enterprise, but not with any actionable purpose in mind. As analytics has emerged, the analysis process is often seen as the solution itself rather than a means to an end. Brooks says Subex has evolved from a state of identifying problems en masse, to identifying, prioritizing and solving problems using a variety of domain-specific analytical approaches that are contextually relevant to business stakeholders within communications operators. Brooks adds that Subex is also applying propensity-based analytics that draw from a range of data sources – not just CRM – and using them to pinpoint and predict factors like customers’ propensity to churn.

Meanwhile, MDS CEO Drew Rockwell offers a similar sentiment, offering the concept of adaptive analytics where practical analytics applications are provided across finance, operations, and many other groups within an operator. The adaptive aspect comes in the ability to grab data from any available and relevant source, adjust and refine the data bring used in the analytics process, and tweak analytical output (CP:Management World: Analytics in action in Catalyst project) to keep pace with changing needs and priorities across the business. These analytical outputs translate into highly refined business controls – a fundamental concept of any business, but in this case applied at a deep level to extremely granular and complex processes.

Rockwell says that “the detail where the mistake is being made is often at the field or record level.” As a result it’s necessary to have analytical applications that can dig down and identify problems at that granular level so that they can be addressed to the benefit of the business on a large scale. Rockwell says this kind of control is becoming increasingly impactful particularly as business processes and the data that drive them become more complex, segmented, and targeted to specific offerings or customer groups.

Further, Rockwell says, operators are finding great value in focused analytical approaches because they can be extended out to, for example, enterprise CFOs, making analytics a key part of the enterprise customer experience. This in turn provides a “stickiness” factor for high value enterprise offerings and adds value on top of networking and communications services.