Rethinking the back office

Telco transformation (as usual), SOA/Web services and a new focus on the IT value chain top the OSS/BSS checklist these days

With the TeleManagement Forum Management World 2008 conference just around the corner, Telephony spoke with Keith Willetts, chairman of the TM Forum, about the show's main themes and the technologies and trends driving the telco back office. More than ever, the service provider IT department has become a linchpin for helping to not only transform how telcos run their networks but their businesses as a whole.

Among the key trends Willetts discussed included an intriguing new direction: helping carriers fit into the larger digital value chain that includes players from computing, media and e-commerce.

On the network ‘supporting’ OSS/BSS: There are probably three angles you can take [today's back-office] transformation from. One is the whole wave now that's started of serious investment going into restructuring of infrastructure, networks and systems. BT was first out the box a few years ago, followed by Telstra and KPN and Vodafone and Telecom Italia and AT&T and others. It's a wave now of many, many billions of dollars lining up now. I call it the “trillion-dollar play.”

The second real big thing is the whole change of the business model and even the business that those companies are in — the business transformation from not just communications services but information services, content-based services, advertising services. They fundamentally change the way [service providers work]. To run these types of services, they need to work in a value chain with other partners. That's a whole different business model, particularly when money starts flowing the other way. Instead of the user paying, [another] provider pays [the carrier].

Finally, the third angle is: What does that mean for people who have to create and deliver and monetize those services — the business the TMF is in? It used to be [operations support services] and [business support services], but really today you'd have to call it enabling technologies and processes. It's a software-enabling layer that creates and delivers those services and the network, which OSS used to support; [today], the network supports those services.

On the advertising back-office challenge: The telecom industry has got to do a lot to deliver advertising. It's not just a question of getting adverts to the person — that's the easy bit — it's getting information about those eyeballs back to the advertiser since they're the customers now. And there we've got a real, real problem because the information — and telecom companies, particularly mobile companies, hold a lot of extremely valuable information on their users that could be monetized back to advertisers — is in a myriad of different data formats and a myriad of different systems. And unlike Google or Facebook or whomever, the telecom industry itself is fragmented into thousands of different providers around the world.

On technology and platform trends driving transformation: One common thing all that transformation programs are doing is consolidating many networks and their attendant systems stacks and resolving them down to one. You don't need a network for every service, [rather] one network for many services — therefore, one set of back-office systems for many services. That's proving to be a very big challenge for people to get their heads around. That's more or less causing people to say “I can't really get there with slow evolution from my old mainframe-based systems.”

When I talk to vendors and systems integrators, they're seeing a much greater willingness to ‘clean-sheet’ the systems and go for a brand-new service-oriented architecture kind of approach. I will say that the operator side will tell you the systems aren't always necessarily there [today] in the form they want them when they want then. But there's a pretty good consensus on an SOA base and the concept of building services out of reusable components.

Is that all getting played out perfectly and everybody is doing the same thing? No. Some players are continuing in the same old way; I think they are going to hit the wall. Some players are making substantial change and investment.