THE SAME ONLY DIFFERENT

Anyone who followed their older siblings though the same school understands the indignation of cable operators that get treated by vendors as if they are telecom's little brother. And any software vendor considering porting its telecom solution over to the cute little coax company that is suddenly sprouting telephony had better understand the difference.

We're not taking lessons from the telcos in any direct way,” said Veenod Kurup, executive director of data OSS for Cox Communications. “Cable has to be dealt with as cable, and we need to get vendors to understand our business.”

At a gathering of operations support systems (OSS) providers in San Diego at the end of February, cable operators made it clear to vendors that success in the telco OSS space doesn't necessarily translate to success in the cable OSS space.

Such a stance by cable operators may be just a veiled threat to get vendors to pay attention to their needs. But the timing suggests that these operators are getting ready to spend money to make money by instilling a little operational efficiency.

Unfortunately for those vendors salivating over cable's growing market potential for back office solutions, the operators' stance also suggests that they want more than just tweaked telco solutions to help them achieve that efficiency. “The next generation OSS to us may not be [the same] as where you come from,” Kurup told vendors.

Cox and other cable operators are emerging from the tail end of a land-grab and customer acquisition binge that rivals only that of the long-haul backbone providers — except that cable operators have actual customers.

“The cable industry, like a lot of industries, follows the path of least resistance,” said Larry Goldman, director of service fulfillment OSS for RHK. That path has been to leverage network assets and increase revenue and profit by signing as many customers as they could.

However, “that dynamic of the cable business has come to an end,” Goldman said. “At 1% annual subscriber growth, the business model doesn't work anymore.”

So operators are beginning to shop. But they won't be content to stroll the aisles and check price tags. They want to see their vendors dance.

One of the biggest differences between the cable and telco environments that vendors must address is also the most fundamental: the customer database. The telco customer database is organized by subscribers' telephone numbers. Cable operators, on the other hand, see the customer as a house or street address. Though equally impersonal, the cable methodology presents a challenge to vendors with activation, provisioning and customer relationship management systems that hinge on phone numbers.

There are also no cable/pair assignments in a cable system. The cable network resembles that of a bus architecture in which subscribers and equipment can be added and removed at will. “This leads to not just an inventory need, but an inventory crisis,” said John Hart, vice president of Acterna's newly created OSS solutions unit.

It also leads to a network management crisis. “This industry is pretty bad at finding problems in the network,” Hart said. “It's notorious for that because of the complexity of the network.”

But not all differences make things difficult. For example, fulfillment for cable modems is inherently simpler because cable operators don't have to deal with open access — at least for now.

One of the most difficult issues for potential cable OSS vendors to deal with is one they already are struggling with on the telco side: consolidation.

“With few exceptions, most Tier 1 MSOs are a collection of companies,” Kurup said. “And individual systems have a lot to say about the services and customer care offered in a market and about what you can and cannot do.”

The one thing cable operators and their vendors do well is bill. In some cases, the billing system is the extent of a cable operator's OSS. Operators plan to build their OSSs around those systems.

The cable billing business is basically locked up by three vendors: CSG Systems, Convergys and DST Innovis. In the cable world, they are considered legacy systems, which arn't all bad, according to Cox's Kurup. “People always talk about legacy systems in a negative way; we don't feel that way,” Kurup said.

Yet despite being entrenched in the multiple systems operator space, billing and customer care providers will have to adapt to a new cable environment as operators get serious about telephony and other services such as video-on-demand. Operators also aspire to achieve what some refer to as the triple play: voice, video and data on the same pipe and the same bill — if that's the way the customer wants it.

Convergys, arguably No. 2 in the cable billing space behind CSG but more convincingly No. 1 in the cable telephony space, focuses on convergence in general. “Cable telephony is very important, but it is a piece of the overall ability to support convergence,” said Curt Champion, senior director of Convergys' cable and broadband market.

Convergys' approach to supporting convergence for cable operators is to focus on six key areas. These include bundling service catalogs, mediation and activation of real-time transactions as well as fixed-cost transactions, rating — which is relatively new to cable — and flexible accounts-receivable processes and billing and statement options. The sixth area deals with settlement.

“Prior to cable telephony and video-on-demand, settlement was done as a one-off,” Champion said. “But with carrier access billing, IP transactions and royalties for video-on-demand, the settlement gets much more complicated.”

Convergys' ICOMS software will include a release this year that integrates the settlement package from Geneva Technologies, which it acquired last year.

Other vendors have their own ideas about addressing cable OSS. Two vendors considered by some analysts to be top contenders in the cable OSS arena, Acterna and Sigma Systems, come at the space from their own respective core competencies.

Acterna is leveraging its strong position in performance monitoring and testing of cable networks, or what John Hart calls “the grassroots of T&M,” to launch what it calls the industry's first complete cable OSS platform. Sigma, on the other hand, has ditched its “CLEC and cable in a box” taglines and is establishing its service management software, which includes provisioning, activation, diagnostics, workflow and service creation, as a leader with six large cable operators in North America among its customers.

“There are a lot of telecom vendors playing on the cable side, but do they really understand the cable network operators network well enough to be a thought leader?” Hart asked.

Acterna's Vision360 OSS platform is in trials with two international and three domestic cable operators, including Optis in Australia and Cablevision and Time Warner in North America. The platform will provide a suite of applications for network and service layer management that addresses high-speed data initially, then interactive entertainment in June and voice over IP by November.

“This industry understands platforms for services — but not for OSS. So this will be the evolution of their business,” Hart said.

Acterna helped operators build out their network from the T&M side and is as entrenched in the MSO as the billing providers. “We have become their trusted partner,” Hart said.

Sigma's cable OSS software is driven by the same service broker workflow engine that is used for telcos, but the company has tuned its various modules to address key applications such as the profile manager for subscriber information, the diagnostic manager for troubleshooting, the topology manager for assessing the impact of network changes and the self-service manager that lets subscribers select and activate their own services. Sigma also provides a service creation toolkit for defining broadband service packages.

Sigma assumes the obvious — that when going into a cable environment a billing and customer care system already will be in place. “It is really the service management layer that quarterbacks the orders to keep costs down, and that's where we operate,” said Jeff Bernard, vice president of global marketing for Sigma Systems.

Going after the cable OSS space from the billing, service management or network performance angle as these three vendors are doing could prove to be the best for cable operators. As Hart said, “There are enough problems for us all to fix.”

But the shopping has only just begun. Operators are still busy getting their network management acts together after the collapse of Excite@Home left some of them holding the service assurance bag.

This predicament underscores the need for operators to look inward as well as out at software vendors when it comes to network management.

“Cable guys haven't done a lot of this before,” RHK's Goldman said. “The OSSs are out there and available, but getting them put in, making it work and having the staff use it well are completely different things.”