Driven by the need to transform their operations from product-centric to customer centric and to move toward next-generation networks, a growing number of telcos have been structuring their next-generation OSS/BSS systems around service-oriented architecture (SOA), as they find current silo-based IT and network systems are costly to integrate, inflexible and slow to adapt to the fast changing pace of the telecom market.
SOA, which represents the next major step in the evolution of IT strategies, holds promise to telcos looking to bring order to the increasingly complex and chaotic OSS/BSS environment and equip themselves to compete in the changing marketplace.
'Telecoms operators still view their total operating environment as messy and not a symbol of being a successful enabler of future services,' says Patrick Chan, research director for IDC's Asia/Pacific emerging technologies IT services. 'Many are still seeking cost-effective networks, low overhead, highly automated and functional environments that can bridge them to existing and new customers,' he says.
With SOA, which helps decouple the existing tightly coupled network interfaces, service and business systems, telecoms carriers can be quick to innovate services across new channels and increase their speed to market in terms of services, he notes.
Mohan Veloo, senior industry director of Asia Pacific and Japan for the media and utilities industry business unit at Oracle Communications, says another advantage of SOA is that it enables telecom carriers to leverage their existing IT assets and give them the business agility and flexibility required to move toward a flexible, service-oriented and real-time IT and network architecture.
Veloo says current focus of SOA projects includes integration between systems - internal to internal systems and internal to external systems. Another area of focus is to streamline order management and provisioning, as service orders are becoming increasingly complex and lead to costly and lengthy quote-to-cash cycle time and eventually leading to a poor customer experience, he adds.
'This [poor customer experience] can arise during sales configurations, pricing, proposals, and order capture to operations booking, provisioning and billing synchronization.'
Strategic enabler
Already telcos like Telecom Italia, BT, Telstra and PCCW are embracing SOA in one way or another, and some have already seen the benefits from the implementation.
Take PCCW. The Hong Kong incumbent carrier, which operates multiple services, ranging from fixed-line, broadband to mobile to IPTV, is looking at SOA as a strategic enabler for its upcoming quad-play services and its migration toward NGN, says George Fok, managing director of PCCW Solutions, the information and communication technology arm of the incumbent.
'For us, the initial driver is to integrate our OSS/BSS system, but we are also seeing SOA as a long-term strategy,' he said.
According to Fok, PCCW launched three years ago an initiative to revamp its billing and order management (BOM) systems based on SOA to increase operational efficiencies across disparate business units.
Before the revamp, says Fok, each set of PCCW's service (fixed-line, broadband and IPTV) had different silos/domains and separate databases of customer information, which made it impossible for upsell and cross-sell of its multiple products.
In addition, the company also saw the need to have a centralized product information catalog of its multiple products.
Fok says the introduction of SOA not only allows the company to successful transform from a product-centric to customer-centric operation, but also increase operational efficiency and achieve a single view of customers.
Other benefits include increased flexibility and synergy among different operation and business units, he adds.
'For example, if we see a sudden significant increase in the subscription orders of English Premier League channel, we can then shift our supporting staff of the fixed-line unit to handle the job,' he says. 'This can be done even without any organizational restructuring.'
The focus of PCCW's SOA project is to integrate the billing and order management systems of its mobile unit to the BOM, which is expected to be completed by September 2008.
Where to start with
Despite the increased recognition among telecoms operators, industry players and analysts say there are still many challenges for the uptake of SOA in the telecoms industry.
For one thing, telcos find it difficult to implement and map the SOA frameworks to reality, and many telcos are struggling to find an entry point into SOA projects, says Dan Ternes, CTO for Asia Pacific/Japan at Tibco Software.
'Indeed the first projects always take longer as you have to have some of the common infrastructure put in place, but as you grow it gets a lot easier,' he says.
'It's like building a house. You have to do the ground work first, i.e. integrate the systems, transform the data into common models and then build your processes. At that stage, you have then abstracted the applications and you can wrap this up as services. These can then be easily reused. And you start to get the value.'
Another challenge, according to Chan at IDC, is to identify and regroup a common service platform based on SOA across different business units, such as mobile, IMS, IPTV, web services and many more unknown consumer-demand services to come.
Complicating the issue further is the fact that other telecom frameworks and standards - such as eTOM, NGOSS and TMF SID - that support telcos for the introduction of SOA will continue to emerge and evolve, Chan adds.
'Although telcos have a better understanding of SOA, a lot of them are pretty lost when it comes to the issue of how to map and implement all these next-gen telecoms frameworks alongside their SOA implementation.'
If nothing else, the fact that most telcos adopt a piecemeal approach to their SOA projects and aren't fully integrated with other business functions will also undermine the benefits that SOA promises to deliver.
Veloo at Oracle says instead of trying to do point-to-point SOA integration, telecom operators should enable and streamline their business processes. For example, he says, the concept-to-cash process should cut across marketing, CRM, billing and even provisioning functions.
By doing so operators will not only lower integration costs, but also ensure flexibility and adaptability to address changes and fierce competition that exist within the telecom industry today, Veloo notes.
Fok at PCCW concurs: 'Operators should not see the implementation of SOA as a pure-technology migration, and need to take business processes into account.'