Deregulation and technological development in BSS/OSS arena are
likely to trigger sporadic growth in this sector
As India leapfrogs its way on deregulating its telecom policies, the Business
Support System/Operations Support System (BSS/OSS) market is likely to benefit
from this move. "De-regulation coupled with custo-mer centric business
model for operators and advancements in new technologies is going to push the
BSS/OSS market to the next level," informed Amit Mehta, Head (OSS/BSS),
Mahin-dra BT.
Technological development in the current BSS/OSS segment is
driving the demand for new systems or significant upgrades of existing systems.
"As BSS industry grows, customer expectation will also increase and an
operator will need to invest in areas like self service CRM on the Internet or
minimal call waiting time," he added.
"As of now, the Indian market for BSS/OSS is pegged to be
hovering around $ 33.1 million mark. Local System Integrators have a pie of
around 42.9 percent, while about 57.1 percent is going in the hands of
international vendors," he informed. Frost & Sullivan have estimated
that this market will touch $ 200 million mark by the end of 2004.
Talking about the COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) products, he
said that the next generation COTS products are aiming for a component based
approach, so database integra-tion would be quite important for the operators.
Most tier 2 operators in India still have decentralized billing systems for
their respective circles of operation. And it may be said that existing billing
solutions for some tier 2 operators have been in use for more than three years.
So, now is the time when quite a number of operators will be looking forward to
upgrading their billing systems.
If we see the overall market dynamics, overall operator spending
on OSS ISV solutions is largely restricted to billing systems and obviously
almost all the operators are looking forward to having an inter-connect solution
when it comes to providing accurate billing.
The market opportunity is quite huge and the opening up of VOIP
space, the emergence of CDMA as a major technology for telecom implementation,
the privatization of ILD/NDL market segments is creating a big opportunity
towards BSS/OSS segment.
Here comes outsourcing
Outsourcing is happening for quite sometime but it is only now that it has
been hyped up quite a lot. Within the BSS/OSS segment, outsourcing is quite
active in areas such as legacy or heritage applications support/development or
enhancement.
This apart there are other areas within OSS segment where outsourcing is
likely to take off-platform develop-ment and support, testing
hardware/software and plat-form process development and not to mention the
research and development in mobile applications modeling and simulation in
designing proofs of concepts.
Future billing solutions
Successful billing solutions will have to provide a bi-direc-tional,
real-time link between the physical network infrastruc-ture and Operations and
Business Support Systems (OSS/BSSs) to enable advanced network and service usage
and automated service provision-ing. Service providers need to understand how
their networks are being used and translate this knowledge into new revenue
opportunities by developing, deploying, and managing profitable services.
BSS will have to mould itself according to the market
dyna-mics and keep up with the pace of change. There are a number of challenges
in front of an operator now. Rapid increase in the number of customers, new
services being introduced and a constant change in pricing policy are some of
the hurdles that an operator will have to keep off to.
"Wireless is one area where there will be huge growth,
so wireless operators and next generation service providers will have be on
their toes with re-gards to providing accurate billing to their respective
custo-mers," said Prakash Sadagopan, Director (Asia Pacific), at Convergys.
Here areas such as mobile internet access, mobile intranet
and extranet access coupled with rich/simple voice services will encourage the
innovative billing solutions and their development in the coming months.
Necessity is likely to push innovative sprits to the limits
while designing appropriate billing systems for a myriad set of applications.
"We are in for quite a number of surprises over here. Very soon we will
have billing per usage for MB, per ticker symbol (stock applications), per seat
(for software development), per page (for fax), per bullet (for games) and per
download for screen savers," Sadagopan informed.
Convergent billing is where things are moving now. "We
are moving from earlier billing models to a multi network, multi service and
multi market billing approach. As we move forward, operators will find a need to
add complex value chain revenue management to billing and enhance their
revenues," he added.
Zia Askari
(CyberMedia News Service)