ITU provides platform for OSS/BSS

Amidst the hustle and bustle of ITU Telecom World 2006 held in December last year there was much of interest for the OSS/BSS sector. George Malim reports from Hong Kong.

Big telecoms shows are always a bit of a worry for OSS/BSS vendors. How do they make an impact against the million - and often multi-million dollar noise made by the big vendors at such events? With difficulty is the answer and broadly ITU Telecom World was no exception. Western hardware vendors turned up in their droves salivating a big equipment deals with massive Chinese operators, while Chinese vendor Huawei was turning its charm right back at the western operators. However, the OSS/BSS sector did make a big splash this time, although it has to be said the splash in question was largely made by hardware vendors.

Sun Microsystems announced a new global co-operation with Ericsson and Nokia that aims to unite the Network Equipment Provider (NEP) community and assist telecommunications operators and service providers. Coming together as the Telecommunications Platform Initiative, members are jointly developing the requirements for a standardised, integrated telecommunications technology platform to simplify technology integration by enabling design, development and supply chain efficiencies.

“Ericsson is pleased to be a part of this collaborative community which is bringing us together to advance the industry as a whole,” said Torbjorn Lundahl, vice president of Ericsson Multimedia Systems. “With the backing of key NEPs and the advantage of Sun’s community-building experience and in-depth understanding of open technologies, I am confident that this effort will lead to a much stronger industry alignment and bring major benefits to our customers.”

Jyrki Holmala, vice president, OSS Software, Networks, Nokia said: “The Telecommunications Platform Initiative recognises that technology integration is a common challenge for all NEP sans shows our willingness to work together to find cost-efficient and open standards-based solutions for the industry. There is an excellent fit with Nokia’s Operations Support Systems (OSS) middleware strategy and our Open EMS Suite platform product roadmaps.”

Carriers welcomed the move; “We are faced with huge integration issues today when we purchase solutions from multiple NEPs,” said Javier Gutierrez, Enablers Development senior manager of Telefónica Moviles España. “The results of the newly formed Telecommunications Platform Initiative will help us simplify platform management, allowing us to focus more on rapidly launching innovative services for our customers.”

Away from the headline announcements it was business as usual for the OSS industry. CBOSS, the Russian OSS provider, now famed for its dancing girls almost as much as its huge Asian customer-base, was present in force. Andrey Morozov, president and CEO of the company, was happy to see large IT players becoming interested in the OSS/BSS market and explained CBOSS’ thinking in this regard: “If we divide operators’ businesses into two new areas we can recognise there’s a division between IT and the network,” he said. “Today CBOSS is trying to be able to answer a question about the unique, most wide understanding of the IT part of the operator’s business. Regardless of whether an operator has a border between the network and the IT part, CBOSS is able to supply turnkey, integrated solutions to operate any part of their business. What does it mean? It means we’re able to eliminate all expenditure on systems integrators by a service provider.”

Morozov went on to explain how CBOSS has developed its business. “We, in CBOSS, had the idea to create all the IT parts of the OSS/BSS but, if operators liked they didn’t have to take all the parts, if they did like, they could get a fully managed, integrated solution from one supplier – pre-integrated to support all their needs,” he said. “Some experts at the 3GSM six years ago said we would never succeed. They said: “Operators are a big cash cow surrounded by a crowd of wolves and each wolf wants to eat. The other wolves won’t let you eat the whole cow. They’ll destroy you and you won’t be able to deliver.” Well, we were the hungriest wolf.”