VanillaPlus February-March 2014 by Prestige Media

ISSN 1745-1736

February / March 2014 Volume 16 Issue 1

Can OSS/BSS rise to the LTE challenge? Why CSPs need fit for purpose systems to maximise on the opportunities of LTE

BIG DATA ANALYTICS Does big data mean big money? Read our VanillaPlus Insight at www.vanillaplus.com

POLICY How to safeguard profits. Read our VanillaPlus Insight at www.vanillaplus.com

BILL & CHARGE How CSPs can make money from BSS. Read our VanillaPlus Insight at www.vanillaplus.com

FRAUD & REVENUE Have new models raised the stakes for CSPs? Read our VanillaPlus Insight at www.vanillaplus.com

PLUS: More optimisation assets sold as Mobixell and Newfield Wireless acquired • Amdocs goes for a drive in AT&T’s connected car • Siemens Convergence Creators sells R&D • Cerillion goes live in El Salvador • WeDo Technologies launches RAID on ZAIN group CSPs • Anite accelerates LTE Advanced carrier aggregation • Read the latest news at www.vanillaplus.com

CEM Can CEM be a profit centre? Read our VanillaPlus Insight at www.vanillaplus.com

Fast, Flexible & In Control MEET THE AGILE OPERATOR From serving more customers, to serving more needs, from running and maintaining, to caring and creating – entering the Networked Society requires a shift in focus. As the industry moves faster, the key to success is agility. Operators need to balance customer experience, efﬁciency and innovation all at once. This is where we can help. Working with the world’s leading operators, we know what it takes.

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@EricssonOSSBSS

C O N T E N T S

IN THIS ISSUE TALKING HEADS Can OSS/BSS rise to the LTE challenge?

Lyn Cantor tells VanillaPlus how the global CSP market is adapting to LTE deployment and explains how the opportunity to extract real value from the big data that CSPs generate is, at last, becoming real

22 4 EDITOR’S COMMENT George Malim wonders when CSPs will hit the edge of efficiency

5 INDUSTRY NEWS Flash Networks acquires Mobixell for optimisation, Tektronix Communications completes Newfield Wireless deal

ROAMING AND CHARGING

6 MARKET NEWS Sandvine reports record revenues, AT&T selects Amdocs to support Drive Studio connected cars effort 8 PRODUCT NEWS Anite accelerates LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation, Anritsu introduces error detection and enhancements

10 THE CONTRACT HOT LIST The latest vendor deals listed

ANALYSIS

11 CONTRACT NEWS Columbus El Salvador goes live with Cerillion CRM and billing, Glo Mobile Ghana selects Revector for fraud detection 12 PEOPLE NEWS WeDo Technologies appoints new vice president, Mark Edwards to lead MDS 14 EXPERT OPINION Robert Machin warns of storm forecasts ahead for BSS as it attempts to cope with a more complex and wider range of services 16 FEATURE John Giere explains why European CSPs should be looking to shared data plans

VoLTE SERVICE ASSURANCE

19 VANILLAPLUS 4G INSIGHT The sixth of our VanillaPlus Insights starts here with 30 pages exploring how CSPs are turning to OSS/BSS to optimise, monetise, plan and roll out their LTE networks. The network may be different but at least, this time, the back office is being planned in parallel.

The Insight contains a specially-commissioned report written by Clare McCarthy, the practice leader of telco operations and IT at analyst firm Ovum. She explores the importance of activation, charging and monitoring of services on the LTE networks that are being deployed now. CLOCKING OFF

52 VanillaPlus

51 DIARY Where to go and who to see 52 Clocking Off! Nick Booth says if you’re IT agnostic, you’re in the wrong job. 3

C O M M E N T

Have CSPs hit the edge of efficiency? Much of the content of VanillaPlus over the last few years has focused on how CSPs can become agile, flexible businesses and optimise the efficiency of their operations. In an industry with declining margins from its core business, that’s a vital and obvious area to pay great attention to but, because there will always be a glass ceiling of diminishing returns from doing that, we’ve also kept a close eye on how the back office can enable new forms of revenue generation

T George Malim, editor, VanillaPlus

here’s only so much business transformation that can be achieved through efficiency alone – even in vast, fragmented and high volume industries like telecoms. To take an example in the OSS/BSS market, fraud prevention systems typically make large gains early in their deployment as the obvious frauds are detected and halted and then incrementally performance drops off as the readily identifiable leakage is staunched. That’s also true to an extent in the search for efficiency. Big gains can be made relatively rapidly and then the long tail begins. That leaves CSPs in a state of transition in which the current situation begins to reverse. Where five years ago the focus was increased efficiency with new revenue opportunities as a nice-to-have, the pivot point is here now. Revenue generation from new services becomes the focus and further increases in efficiency are the nice-to-have side benefit.

year’s show, it’s clear the industry is being embraced by OTTs – the message from this must be CSPs have some value to add beyond simple transport, after all. In addition, the expected lead theme of the show is the Internet of Things. Perhaps that’s not the most exciting area from a network point of view. Most IoT activity will be relatively low bandwidth and involve applications that are not much different to those already in use. However, CSPs’ expertise at doing things at great scale in a quality-assured way is a valuable skill and path to revenue for them. OSS/BSS is central to this enablement of the agile, flexible and new, multi-directional, multi-party business models. LTE flattens the mobile architecture but a flat foundation is easiest to build on. What is stimulating is the OSS/BSS sector’s effort will now be focused more on constructing new revenue opportunities rather than on making old architecture operate more efficiently. Enjoy the magazine.

At Mobile World Congress that shift will be evident. With a keynote from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at this

EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 1225 319 566 george@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 cherisse@vanillaplus.com

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807412 mark@vanillaplus.com OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807411 charlie@vanillaplus.com PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@vanillaplus.com

George Malim

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VanillaPlus is distributed free to selected named individuals worldwide who meet the Publisher's terms of Circulation Control. If you would like to apply for a regular free copy supplied at the Publisher's discretion visit www.vanillaplus.com If you do not qualify for a free subscription, paid subscriptions can be obtained. Subscriptions for 6 issues cost £99.00 worldwide (or US$150 / EUR125) including post and packing. VanillaPlus magazine is published 6 times per year.

EDITORIAL ADVISORS Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Andreas Freund, VP Marketing, Orga Systems GmbH

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

David Heaps, senior vice president, strategy, CSG International

Gabriel Matsliach, general manager, BSS Product Line, Comverse

Pat McCarthy, VP of Global Marketing, Service Delivery Solutions, Ericsson

Simon Muderack, senior vice president for marketing and alliances, Sigma Systems

Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, Ericsson

Dr Reinhard Zuba, CMO, Vipnet (Telekom Austria)

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I N D U S T R Y

N E W S

Flash Networks acquires Mobixell for optimisation and monetisation Flash Networks is to acquire Mobixell, a provider of mobile data management, network optimisation, and rich media delivery systems. The companies say the acquisition will result in them Liam Galin: Combined having a R&D strength to combined market accelerate innovation share larger than any other independent vendor, with hundreds of

deployments, serving over one billion subscribers worldwide. The deal will enable Flash Networks to meet growing demand for data optimisation, acceleration and monetisation services following the proliferation of new consumer devices, rich multimedia content, and high speed 3G and 4G networks. “With the ever growing demand for our offering, this collaborative venture is an important step in establishing our dominance in the global market,” said Liam Galin, president and chief executive of Flash Networks. “As the largest player in this domain – both in size and worldwide customer reach, our

combined R&D strength will accelerate the speed of innovation to evolve our already ground breaking products. As we are interested in extending our position in the mobile operator market, Flash Networks is committed to continuing support of Mobixell’s solutions and customers.” Klod Ghez, the chief executive of Mobixell, added: “We are pleased to be joining forces with Flash Networks. By combining our technological expertise and broad customer base, together with our mutual customer commitment, Flash Networks is uniquely positioned to enhance our offering and support our customers.”

Tektronix Communications completes Newfield Wireless deal

Lyn Cantor: Geolocation capability to enhance offering to CSPs

Tektronix Communications has acquired Newfield Wireless, a privately held pioneer in nextgeneration mobile network optimisation with geoanalytics intelligence.

Newfield Wireless brings a layer of geoanalytics and visualisation tools for the RAN, enabling mobile operators to dynamically pinpoint issues at the subscriber and network level in real-time across 2G, 3G and 4G networks. Newfield’s solutions deliver a full range of

capabilities to support critical decisions in engineering, operations, sales and marketing, regulatory compliance and reporting. When combined with Tektronix Communications’ probe-based network monitoring solution, the vendors claim operators can affordably centralise endto-end management and visibility of their mobile network, from subscriber to the data centre. “Newfield Wireless’s RAN optimisation products, services and expertise will combine with our own solutions to benefit service providers in two ways. One is the ability to assure customer experience across the entire mobile network down to the geolocated device. The other is an enhanced ability to provide new value-add data feeds into numerous departments –

Sponsored by: 12

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a distinguished board of directors at the SCTE Foundation. NetCracker is committed to supporting the SCTE Foundation’s mission and we look forward to close cooperation and partnership in the years to come.”

Andrew Feinberg: Helping cable engineers advance their careers

Feinberg added: “I am pleased to join such

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Don’t operate – innovate! When it comes to BSS, there are storm forecasts ahead as technological changes affect CSPs’ operations and they offer a more complex and far wider range of services. Robert Machin explores the extent to which existing systems can weather the storm

D The author, Robert Machin, is director of product marketing, EMEA, at CSG International

epending on how we read the forecasts, the business climate for mobile communications over the next three years can be seen as threatening or promising, but either way, no-one is assuming plain sailing as we swing from network services to digital services and from communications to complex variations on convergent information and communications technology (ICT). Increasingly, we ask ourselves: when it comes to future business support systems (BSS), is the old ship still seaworthy, or should we be looking at an altogether different vessel for the voyages to come?

Although we have been anticipating it for many years, LTE rollout will peak during 2014 and 2015, as will the corresponding customer take-up of 4G devices, mobile broadband access, and mobile internet services. This raises questions: • Are communications service providers (CSPs) ready for the storm tide of data that is about to break over their BSS decks? • Are they able to intelligently optimise processes to keep operational costs low but business responsiveness and the customer experience high? • Can they work with a broad range of partners, whether to build new digital services for adjacent market verticals, to provide channels to market for content and media partners, or to take other initiatives to monetise their network investments? • Can they get new services to market fast enough to fully exploit new ideas and defend against competitor initiatives? Many CSPs are aware that the challenges of the next two years will make very specific demands on their business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS) – in terms of both functionality and performance. They see that new revenue possibilities are beginning to manifest themselves, as the digital lifestyle become more pervasive and businesses and enterprises become increasingly mobile and virtualised around the cloud. But how many are considering that these fundamental shifts in the business environment may signal a real sea change in how the business should be supported?

The future is here LTE is growing faster than any mobile technology previously rolled out to the market. Network deployments will peak over the next 24 months, more LTE-capable devices are being released, and fourth generation capability is gradually penetrating the market through organic replacement of consumer and business handsets and other equipment. But 4G success isn’t just about networks and devices. LTE will move mobile networks firmly into mobile internet territory and CSPs will need to compete for every dollar as customer choice opens up to all kinds of third party communications services, further undercutting traditional revenue streams. Intelligent discounting, bundling, promoting and other charging strategies can help to keep the customer on board and, just as importantly, spending their money with the CSP rather than with third parties. Competition now is not only for the customer’s account, but for each transaction, and the importance of real-time integrated policy management and charging becomes increasingly evident. Notwithstanding efforts to maintain customer loyalty, traditional revenues will continue to slide, and the hunt to find alternative sources of income continues. Many new propositions are likely to depend on third parties — as suppliers or partners — as service providers develop new ways to utilise their telecoms capability, and seek to redefine their role in the digital economy. One thing is for sure – it will be vitally important to develop propositions quickly and take them to market fast, whether to maximise the first-mover advantage of innovative thinking, or to counter competitor initiatives. Inefficient and siloed back office systems will block the innovative thinking on which future success depends. CSPs have many unique advantages that can be exploited and turned into revenue, particularly when applied to the emerging mobile enterprise sector. Providing guaranteed quality of service across digital networks will be a vital enabler of customer confidence in cloud services, in turn nurturing and sustaining a critical new revenue stream as CSPs move into ICT, providing software, applications and

The coming changes in mobile technology and the business climate require more than running repairs – a more fundamental change of direction may be

needed, turning the IT ship into the prevailing wind to meet the challenges of the new digital economy.

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platforms as well as communications. Helping enterprises and individuals to defend themselves against cyber-crime is another pivotal and natural role for CSPs, as enterprises increasingly recognise that while mobility and virtualisation offer great benefits to the business, they also carry significant security risks.

Digital demands and operational responses Many of the changes in BSS are about making the business more responsive and agile, including: • Carrying out more customer-impacting activities in real-time, such as charging, balance management and the application of policy. • Rationalising the product management process through a centralised product catalogue to ensure consistency, eliminate errors and shorten the critical period between product concept and launch. Three to six-month product lifecycles won’t cut it for digital services. • Automating partner management, and making it easier to bring new partners on board, offer third party content, and take collaborative propositions to new markets. • Exploiting customer, service and network data to optimise the business and maximise customer loyalty and value. These capabilities are no longer just nice to have, but are business-critical, and for many CSPs, represent a significant transformation of incumbent systems which were designed to support a range of different service portfolios. But upgrading functionality may not be enough. For many CSPs, the migration from communications to digital service provision and to ICT will be the kind of diversification that will trigger fresh thinking about how the business should be supported. CSPs will certainly need fundamental capabilities to manage customers, partners, services, assets and more as they sail into uncharted waters—but this could be a

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good time to think about where those capabilities should come from. Do network operators or service providers want to source and integrate new capability themselves, given the typical timescales of a major deployment or transformation? Perhaps more importantly, do they want to risk capital in transforming current business platforms to support services whose return is as yet unquantifiable? In defining the requirements for future platforms, which way will CSPs bet? On broadcast services? Rich content? Cloud services for enterprise? Machine-to-machine applications for other industry verticals and government agencies? Cyber-security offerings? Or myriad other possible digital propositions, many not even yet considered. Can any of us be certain where the success stories will be written over the next three to five years?

New ways to work The key question as we go into 2014 may be whether now is the time to gamble scarce capital on uncertain futures. Or does it make more sense to find partners that can provide the broad and deep operational capability that you may need to draw on, freeing up your key resources to explore new partnerships, markets, propositions and different ways of doing business – to find the new sources of revenue that will only come from genuine innovation. Managed services can be a cost-effective way of doing business, for sure, but many CSPs are now finding that the flexibility they can offer also encourages innovation and responsiveness – particularly when the partner offers a strong combination of technology, service experience and domain expertise, and the business relationship is based not just on cost, but on meaningful business outcomes and shared risk. For us, and for our CSP clients, the bottom line in 2014 is: don’t operate when you can innovate!

www.csgi.com

SHARED PLANS

It’s time for more shared data plans in Europe The author, John Giere, is chief executive and president of Openwave Mobility

haring is good. That’s the pricing strategy that two of the United States’ top mobile operators adopted when they introduced shared data plans in 2012. Verizon and AT&T Mobility broke new ground when they allowed

different subscribers to use a shared data allowance across different devices with unlimited voice and text. Since then, a number of other American operators followed suit and in the past few weeks, US Cellular became the latest to launch shared mobile data plans.

US mobile operators have pioneered shared data plans which allow users to share packages and bundles of data across their families or even small businesses. Here, John Giere, explains why European CSPs are missing out

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It is not hard to see why shared data plans have proved popular. Most households have a variety of internet-connected smartphones and tablets. Yes, shared data plans benefit families but the fact is even individual subscribers can benefit from this as they can spread the data pool across different devices. Put simply, for the consumer, shared data plans can offer value, flexibility and take the hassle out of managing multiple subscriptions – keeping bill shock to a minimum. For CSPs, shared data plans can increase customer loyalty and revenues. According to AT&T, over 13 million devices were connected in less than one year on its shared data packages. Verizon reported that 23% of its customer base subscribed to its Share Everything plan. The CSP is said to have added 1.8 million customers during the quarter – 1.5 million of which were for long-term contracts.

Europe vs USA While shared data plans have proved popular among mobile operators in the United States, European CSPs have been slow to launch this pricing strategy for nonbusiness customers. TeliaSonera in Sweden claimed to have launched the first European shared plan in March 2013 and this was followed in the UK by EE in July 2013. So, why have European mobile operators been slow to adopt shared data plans? Some CSPs fear that introducing shared data services would require wholesale changes to be made to the billing platform. CSPs are unsure if their system can effectively handle simultaneous always-on data sessions from different devices and whether they can identify subscribers who are nearing their data limits to effectively notify and upsell to customers. While these might seem like formidable issues, America’s largest privately held mobile operator, C Spire introduced shared data plans in December 2012 and addressed these challenges very effectively. It has successfully driven revenues and increased customer loyalty – all without making wholesale changes to its back-office and billing systems.

Case study: C Spire C Spire takes pride in its personalised wireless proposition and its shared data plan was to be a reflection of this customer service philosophy. C Spire therefore wanted to give consumers more choice and empower subscribers to control how they use mobile data. The CSP wanted a system which allowed subscribers to know precisely what they’re spending and exactly what they’re receiving. To roll out this new pricing plan, it selected a mobile data charging

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solution to help create two new offerings: CHOICE Data Plans and SHARED Data Plans. CHOICE Data Plans include unlimited data at a lower price but excluding tethering and with a pre-set limit of 30 minutes video streaming. By segmenting out these two premium services, subscribers would have to pay extra for them when required. However, customers would always know what to expect on their monthly bills and avoid bill shock. On the other hand, subscribers who rarely stream mobile videos or tether their devices don’t have to pay for services they don’t plan to use.

John Giere and C-Spire will be delivering a speech on day two at Mobile World Congress: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 at 1600. The session is entitled “Driving New Revenues and Relationships for Operators and Brands”

SHARED Data Plans were aimed at families and small enterprises. The pricing plan is for a group of users to share a common monthly data allowance rather than having to subscribe to individual data plans. Both of these plans have the added capability of monitoring data usage in real-time so subscribers can benefit from an intuitive shock absorber. When users are close to reaching their data limits, subscribers are notified inline and can choose to purchase a top-ip pass within a few clicks and taps. The shared data plans have been an amazing success for C Spire accounting for two-thirds of new incremental revenue. Take up of the CHOICE video pass premium service has grown 100% year on year with significant positive impact on revenue.

It is good to share Shared data plans have proved popular with subscribers, and North American CSPs have launched innovative pricing plans to meet customer needs. Yet, most of their European counterparts are still lagging to adopt this pricing strategy. As C Spire has shown, shared data plans can increase revenues, rather than cannibalise revenues – and do so without wholesale changes to its billing system – a key consideration for any CSP. Consumers use a plethora of always connected devices and this trend is only set to continue with new technologies from smart-watches to glasses which will all require additional data. As such, consumers are likely to want data plans which allow them to share their pool of data across different devices – and with members of the family, a model they intuitively understand with their family’s broadband data allowance. The US is a different market to Europe of course, but not so different that a shared mobile data allowance doesn’t make perfect sense to subscribers and business sense to CSPs. The customer experience benefits and bottom-line benefits are there, and with the positive case studies that are there for the world to see, it is indeed time for European CSPs to get moving and get on the very positive shared plan bandwagon.

4G Can OSS/BSS rise to the LTE challenge?

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VanillaPlus Insight February/March 2014

CONTENTS 22

TALKING HEADS Lyn Cantor, the president of Tektronix Communications, tells VanillaPlus how the global CSP market is adapting to LTE deployment and explains how the opportunity to extract real value from the big data that CSPs generate is, at last, becoming real

4G ANALYST REPORT Our specially commissioned analyst report, authored by Clare McCarthy, the practice leader of telco operations and IT at analyst firm Ovum

EXPERT OPINION Edoardo Rizzi says it’s time for customer experience assurance to address the pain caused by the mobile broadband explosion

OSS/BSS FOR 4G CSPs need to decide which area to improve on first, writes Nick Booth

EXPERT OPINION Shannon Bell says policy control becomes mandatory as CSPs move to LTE

ROAMING AND CHARGING LTE presents new complexities when it comes to roaming. Jonny Evans reports.

EXPERT OPINION Petter Järtby advocates an integrated approach to policy and charging

ANALYSIS Chris Nicoll reports on Analysys Mason’s global LTE forecasts

VoLTE SERVICE ASSURANCE George Malim assesses whether VoLTE will provide a real step up in quality for users

TALKING HEADS

Lyn Cantor

38 OSS/BSS FOR 4G

42 LTE ROAMING AND CHARGING

47 VOLTE ASSURANCE

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Data and video-hungry users on LTE networks will feed CSPs’ appetite for increased ARPU and enable investment in data analytics yn Cantor is the president of Tektronix Communications, which he rejoined in 2011 from Visual Network Systems (VNS) where he was senior vice president and general manager. Prior to his term with VNS, Cantor served as vice president of worldwide sales, service and marketing at Tektronix Communications. Over the course of his 27year career, of which 14 years have been with Tektronix Communications, Cantor has held various vice president positions in Americas sales, global channels, product management and marketing, in addition to having general manager responsibility. Here he tells VanillaPlus how the global CSP market is adapting to LTE deployment and explains how the opportunity to extract real value from the big data that CSPs generate is, at last, becoming real thanks to the tools and technologies that are now being deployed

VanillaPlus: What were the main themes and market drivers that characterised CSP focus in 2013? Lyn Cantor: I saw more of a mixed bag of themes and drivers in 2013 than in previous years. There have been a lot of differences with respect to LTE deployments. The pace of deployment and the market dynamics in the US have been pretty high so that has had a positive effect on the spending on and the speed of deployment of other technologies that surround or are adjacent to LTE in that market. In the US we have seen aggressive spending which contrasts sharply with what we are seeing in Europe where the user demand and the regulatory environment has not driven the same uptake for LTE or a robust data services network. European appetite for LTE is starting to turn up a bit but ARPU remains much higher in the US. People are much more willing to spend – mostly on video services – and that market has not ignited yet in Europe.

VP: If the Europeans are being cautious and waiting for demand to crystalise and the US has already initiated LTE, how did Asia develop in 2013? LC: In Asia we see a hybrid of both dynamics depending on which country you’re in. Some markets, such as Japan, Australia and Singapore, have really accelerated their spending and are very active markets. However, Asia is composed of very different national markets each of which are moving at their own pace. Overall, I’d characterise 2013 as a mixed environment in which we won new customers and brought the vast majority of our 3G customers over to LTE. VP: How did you respond to these contrasting rates of LTE market development? LC: We followed the customers and the spending and put our resources to work, cutting our teeth on the next one to two phases of the challenges CSPs operators are facing. By working with CSPs like AT&T,

In Europe we did see more spending on 3G and CSPs dipping their toes in the water on LTE but operators are being thoughtful about their timing and deployments. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of

momentum for CSPs looking to achieve first mover advantage.

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Verizon and T-Mobile in the US, we’ve gained great experience. The scale and pace of their deployments have been so great that we’ve not only been able to deploy LTE networks but other technology such as voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Diameter signaling.

Lyn Cantor: We’ve dealt with the early deployments of our LTE solutions and handled the scale of the largest CSP roll-outs

The great thing for us is that we’ve dealt with the early deployments of our solutions and handled the scale of the largest CSP roll-outs. That has hardened our experience and products which will serve us well as roll-out continues.

We believe we have the most robust solutions to serve and deploy for 3G and 4G customers. The systems have integrated workflow linking customer care through the multiple technologies within the network. We’re really well prepared for the market’s timing as Europe and Asia come on line.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

We will see walls around roaming coming down but that creates substantial challenges

VP: This isn’t a voice or data world anymore. It’s a unified world of voice, video and data served to customers in a quality aware way. How has this landscape changed since the deployment of 3G? LC: When I think about the deployment of networks, CSPs were trying to get capacity on the ground to manage voice, video and data. The first dynamic has been the rapid deployment of LTE networks. The second is that with Diameter signaling the capability is there in those networks to handle the immense scale and the requirements for flexibility. Operators are now trying to move subscribers over to LTE-based handsets so they can tune down their older networks and get older handsets out of the market. That will ultimately free up 2G and 3G spectrum but not for many years. The immediate gain is moving to the all-IP, Diameter based environment that LTE offers. The main areas of customer demand we see are in video. It’s a big driver in terms of conversational and streaming video and there’s a lot of work going on to create value. We have made inorganic investments in this area. The radio access network continues to be a hotspot area and a big challenge. We’re beginning to be able to see subscribers as closely as you can and I see Tektronix Communications’ job being to help CSPs see the things they can’t today. VP: How will your acquisition of Newfield Wireless help you maximise these opportunities? LC: We acquired Newfield Wireless for three main reasons. The first is that we now get geo-analytical content, much more precise location based intelligence that identifies within 100 metres what services the customers are using and when they move. The second is the analytics platform which we can make use of. Finally, for us the value proposition is in end-to-end assurance. All through CSP engineering and customer care groups, the data we collect is almost as much in demand as our troubleshooting capability. The data content growth has been explosive and our acquisition of Newfield Wireless provides a new and powerful layer of intelligence to augment our existing analytics business and create what we believe is the most comprehensive service offering in this area VP: What will be the most dominant market drivers in 2014?

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LC: Without a doubt they will be video, the radio access network, data enablement and VoLTE in 2014.

VP: What challenges do you see CSPs needing to overcome to address those drivers in 2014? LC: Let’s start with a point of view about economics. We look at markets that have high ARPU and we see CSPs in those that are able to sell services and keep that ARPU up. These CSPs are much more interested in investing in quality of service and data enablement so we are going to move into a new paradigm in 2014 or 2015 when legislation around spectrum and tariffing will be higher. The challenge is that if CSPs can’t make the business case, if they can’t find a way to manage change and they can’t find a way to reduce the cost [of providing capacity] we will see some markets continue to lag. The dynamic of the global tug of war will continue between leading markets and lagging markets. We will see walls around roaming coming down but that creates substantial challenges because those lagging will be a long way behind those that are leading and the roaming experience will therefore be inconsistent. VP: Where do you believe CSPs will see greatest return from analytics and big data in 2014 and beyond? LC: CSPs now have the demand for data enablement. Data from OSS and tools around the subscriber are in such high demand but the tools have got to be able to work around big data and analytics in such a way that they enable CSPs to gain insights. I think we’re seeing the technology and the tools being deployed cost effectively and that’s being achieved because a platform is being provided that enables a variety of use cases, almost on-demand. That means CSPs can find more ways to improve quality of service and find more ways to unlock potential upsell. We see a lot of CSPs moving in this direction. VP: What do operators need to do to take advantage of the opportunities that exist? LC: It really comes down to process improvement and standardisation. CSPs tend to be organised in very siloed ways, with multiple tool vendors and multiple infrastructure vendors. The ability to pull data down from these different environments is a real challenge. To get the data and organise it in a way they can make sense of it certainly remains the challenge. Our tools and our value proposition is a hand in glove strategy that enables us with the vantage points to see all subscriber behaviour. Being able to see all data is not a difficult challenge and as CSPs do that we will be able to get much better insights and unlock the full potential of their data for CSPs.

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The author, Clare McCarthy, is practice leader of telco operations and IT at Ovum

Introduction

TE promises much in the data-driven mobile broadband world, however it is important to remember that, without the ability to activate, monitor and charge for the services running on the network, the LTE network cannot be monetised. While these supporting systems will be impacted by a change in the network, it is not LTE itself that is driving the change, more the services that CSPs want to offer using LTE. The digital lifestyle, which requires streamed video and real-time access to a range of online applications, provides much of the momentum, as well as CSPs’ needs to manage the performance of their network and IT infrastructure, and the impact the infrastructure has on customer experience

Key messages •

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OSS and BSS will be impacted by the characteristics of the next generation high speed mobile broadband services which CSPs want to offer, rather than the LTE technology alone. As LTE network design and roll-outs occur, the OSS will need to be transformed to accommodate and facilitate network planning and design of new cell sites and backhaul transmission which encompasses support for IP configurations and quality of service for enhanced service delivery for streamed video. The OSS solution has to map LTE network elements onto services and provide ongoing service quality information, so that even if no faults have been reported, it identifies degradation in service. The first months of a customer’s contract with a CSP are critical to determining customer loyalty and churn. As customers upgrade or migrate to LTE, CSPs must ensure they map across an existing customer’s profile and retain the context. Mobile CSPs are using network infrastructure sharing as a way forward to roll-out LTE. In addition, M&A activities, and linking sub brands or new brands – for example Orange, T-Mobile and Everything Everywhere in the UK – adds to the complexity of the OSS and BSS migration challenge. Traditional BSS systems were built to deal with

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voice and simple data, so the BSS systems for LTE need to accommodate the characteristics of the new services, and the associated network signaling traffic, as well as the competitive and ecosystem dynamics that make tariff innovation and new business models critical to their future commercial success. The LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) includes a policy charging and control (PCC) architecture so many aspects of charging, rating and policy management will be addressed with this evolution.

THE LTE NETWORK UPGRADE Market drivers The traffic carried on CSPs’ networks is increasingly rich, with voice being supplanted by data services such as streaming audio and video. On some networks, video now accounts for as much as 60% of total traffic, and interactive services like online games will be important to attract certain market sectors. This increased data traffic comes from a variety of end devices such as user-generated content from smartphones, TVs, tablets, and laptops and via multiple channels – including social media, web chat, email, and voice calls. In addition, the frequency of these interactions is accelerating as is the need for real-time management and control.

Source: Ovum

Figure 1: LTE connections by region, 2013–18

Existing mobile networks are unable to handle this traffic growth, so CSPs are looking to all-IP networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) to provide the required bandwidth for these data hungry devices and applications. LTE promises CSPs: • Faster speeds – LTE deployments are reaching up to 100Mbps with LTE Advanced theoretically expected to reach up to 1Gbps • Lower latency – LTE is driving latency down to the point that makes it possible for VoIP and interactive online video games to become a reality • Faster time to market for enhanced services • Better spectrum efficiency • Fewer nodes in the core network, and • Reduced capital and operational expenditure There is a compelling list of savings offered by the functional elements on the core and access network. However, it is planning, delivery and migrating services to the new network, the more complex multimedia and converged services that LTE supports, as well as the more complex billing, processes and business model that will provide the challenge to existing platforms. The operational support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) solutions need to be designed for IP networks to support LTE planning, roll-out and maturity. In terms of service design, service delivery and service support, the LTE infrastructure will require highly resilient networks, higher quality transmission, and faster responses to requests for additions and changes. CSPs need to be mindful of the impact on their OSS and BSS, not just from the technical perspective, but from a customer experience perspective too. There are many over the top (OTT) alternatives for customers today, so if the CSP’s service doesn’t work, there will be a free app available to replace it. Delivering the new service without outages, and ensuring the onboarding process is accurate will be critical for the first months in the customer relationship. If these aspects fail, customers will respond negatively and churn, adversely impacting the CSP’s reputation, market sentiment and share price.

CSPs’ network and technology agenda focuses on LTE for future-proofing LTE uptake will continue to grow rapidly to 2018 to meet the demand for high-speed broadband services. Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for LTE connections between 2013 and 2018 will be 47%, representing 1.27 billion new mobile connections globally. It is worth noting that HSPA will grow by

15% (CAGR) during the forecast period, increasing by 1.4 billion connections. Combined, LTE and HSPA will account for 51% of all global connections in 2018. This means that the services and billing models available to LTE customers will also have to be available over HSPA, otherwise it creates an overly complicated service in which a user’s bill could depend on what network they were attached to – not exactly a seamless customer experience.

Asia-Pacific and North America are driving LTE adoption Asia-Pacific is by far the largest region for LTE subscribers in 2013 and will continue to be so throughout the forecast period. Together with North America, which is the second-largest region for LTE connections, these markets accounted for 85% of total LTE subscribers in 2013. However, as other regions begin to deploy LTE networks, this will change over the forecast period. By 2018, Asia-Pacific and North America will collectively account for 74% of global LTE subscribers, with Eastern and Western Europe collectively accounting for 18%. The remaining 7% will be split across the emerging market regions of South & Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. The highest LTE growth will come from Africa, which will grow at 75% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. Figure 1 shows LTE's forecast growth by region.

Network sharing evolves from a strategic choice to an economic necessity One interesting and significant aspect of the LTE business case discussion is how many CSPs have shared LTE network build outs. Until now, sharing has been reactive and only undertaken once costs become unsustainable, but the network was built independently. With LTE we’ve seen sharing adopted from the outset. A key example is in Sweden where Telenor and Tele2 built on their 3G sharing deal to build a joint LTE network from day one. Open-access LTE networks have also been considered, but these have encountered commercial and political issues. Network sharing creates the same kind of challenges generated by M&A activities – running networks and supporting systems in parallel during the migration period, then integration and removing duplication and costs. However, one of the advantages of introducing LTE is the personalised services, pricing and tariff structures it lends itself to. Clearly sharing too much negates the possibility of such differentiation. Once a homogenous network infrastructure is in place, it falls to the IT systems and platforms to deliver the personalisation and innovation of services and tariffs.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 2: Services CSPs expect VoLTE to enable

Voice over LTE VoLTE can pave the way for new voice services, such as simultaneous voice and video, and enhance existing services, such as video chat. However, these services will have to compete with free offerings from OTT players. In this context, it will be difficult for CSPs to monetise VoLTE value-added services (VASs), and may become a hygiene factor in order to compete with OTT players. Figure 2 highlights some of the service options for VoLTE. However, there are significant barriers to VoLTE adoption. The LTE specifications are data-centric so don’t include support for voice. CSPs have tended to use Circuit-switched Fallback (CSFB) to deliver voice to LTE customers, which means dropping back to 3G or 2G for voice calls. This creates a call set-up delay, which can be very noticeable to the customer, and also means that the legacy network has to be maintained just to do voice, when the more spectrally efficient LTE would be a far more logical use of that same spectrum in the perfect world. Other service parity issues, including support for emergency calls and in-call handover between LTE and legacy infrastructure, are slowing down VoLTE implementations. In addition, the relationship between VoLTE and new charging models for voice is not straightforward. VoLTE in itself neither facilitates nor requires a new kind of charging model. It is designed to support all of the recording, charging, and billing mechanisms that apply in traditional telephony. CSPs can choose to implement a different set of billing principles including “unlimited voice”, but they can do this independently of LTE.

Integrating a new business model With the digital lifestyle becoming the de facto lifestyle in many mature markets, multiple digital platforms will be running on top of LTE and other next generation networks. This brings in new operating and business models, as it encompasses other service providers, including over the top (OTT) providers. CSPs need to work with and support new business partners in terms of service assurance and charging, for example, in order to monetise all possible avenues of revenue generation. CSPs also need to be able to manage concurrent event-based workflows rather than just predefined waterfall decisions making or linear workflows. Integrating the business processes across these new value chains while keeping the cost of delivery down will require that end-to-end service level agreements at an application rather than network level will be increasingly important. It will fall to OSS to assure those SLAs.

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Many business cases for new network technologies such as LTE, SDN and NFV rest not so much on lower upfront capex, but on lower opex and faster time to market. Lower opex comes with simplified and automated systems for product and process develop and management, and all of this is delivered by the OSS/BSS systems.

THE IMPACT ON OSS Traditionally, OSS platforms were focused on the technical control of services, however as IP-based networks need endto-end control of networks, services and the customer experience, along with personalisation of service and customer experience, OSS systems need to be far more commercially focused. And as CSP networks become more software driven, the OSS will need to interface with self organising networks (SON). In terms of the impact of LTE on OSS platforms, there are three domains and process areas of focus. • Network planning and design including capacity planning, resource design, configuration and deployment of cell sites and backhaul, and inventory. • Service assurance to manage the new services reactively, and proactively with big data analytics. • Activation and provisioning for configuring customer profiles and activating new services.

Network planning and design LTE promises high-speed mobile broadband data. Faster data rates, more efficient spectrum usage and spectrum capacity will make online games and video-on-demand on the move possible, as the performance of these services will begin to meet customer expectations. At one level the LTE network roll-out should be a relatively low cost affair. It promises to deliver a relatively more cost effective infrastructure – IP offers cheaper transport technology, a simplified backhaul network, and network control. Many current base station designs accommodate 2G, 3G and 4G radio modules on a common platform, so rather than installing additional and/or duplicating equipment from different suppliers, a LTE module can be installed in an existing cell site to make it LTE capable. The radio planning tools and business processes for 2G and 3G will support LTE and so can be used to determine the location of a new cell site and any capacity upgrades. Although LTE gives CSPs the tools to personalise (quality of) service and applications, not all the controls are currently in place within the RAN.

LTE and the growth in data consumption will change the traditional mobile network architecture. In the voice era, the network goal was coverage. In the data era, it will be about coverage and capacity. Capacity will force CSPs, over time, to increase the number of network endpoints they will need to support. Network capacity needs will be met with an increase of macro and small – micro and pico – cells.

System design The systems architecture for LTE differs from its 2G and 3G predecessors, as it simplifies and automates operation management – for example self-configuration, self-healing, and automatic settings, for the parameters in the radio access to allow better traffic management. This includes Self Organising Network (SON) capability and that means manual – network and service – assurance processes can be removed. The automated processes will identify and execute the planned changes for every new, upgraded and migrated piece of equipment. Automation will also allow standard business rules to be applied for example to the transmission design activities.

Capacity planning

The unified inventory should hold the master data for all network design changes and be able to overwrite temporary workarounds. Automation here is critical for order fulfillment in the BSS. Additionally centralised product and service catalogues will allow CSPs to launch multiple LTE plans for various service bundles or VoIP, they will also be able to personalise the services and experience levels around it, and do so quickly.

Service assurance Fault management solutions in traditional OSS tools are able to detect hardware problems that affect the network elements. However they do not indicate which services have been impacted. A probe based system can monitor a service and its quality, but if there is service degradation, it cannot communicate with the network elements.

Network and capacity planning are still required. LTE capacity planning is required so that long and short term trends in usage are tracked, identified and resolved. This leads to a more efficient allocation of investment as the capacity need is anticipated and dimensioned properly rather than in response to event-based shortages.

Intelligent alarms will need creating based on events generated by the LTE network elements. These alarms will need centralised storage but, to ensure that the CSPs can quickly identify the root cause of the issue, the alarms will need to be directly associated with the new elements introduced as a result of the LTE network upgrade.

Changes within the radio planning processes can be supported by the existing platforms, however the CSP will need to develop new algorithms and rules to account for the new spectrum frequencies and limits of LTE technology. The end game is to automate operational processes should to ensure timely network management.

A transformed and integrated OSS solution should map network elements onto services, and provide ongoing service quality information, so that even if no faults have been reported, it identifies on-going degradation, and importantly, it acts on this information. This kind of predictive problem solving is key to managing customer expectations. So for example, if a customer is streaming a film over LTE and the viewing quality diminishes, the CSP can acknowledge that to the customer and proactively push them an acknowledgement, to stop the customer contacting customer service, or offer compensation.

Backhaul The supporting backhaul network needs transmission bandwidth of several hundred Mbit/s – ten times more than the previous 3G BTS – to support the enormous data capacity that LTE is capable of driving. It will also need support more BTS, including pico- and micro-cells, if higher frequency spectrum is used. If the CSP increases LTE cell capacity, it will have to coordinate it with backhaul capacity and ensure that both are closely linked with the radio planning process.

Unified inventory All the physical information about network infrastructure,

including backhaul transmission should be held in a single network inventory, which should be regularly synchronised with the network management systems to identify discrepancies, preferably through automated systems and process.

Within the trouble-to-resolution process, changes relate to monitoring and managing the quality and appropriate policies. Some processes exist within the core IP network; however the scale of the access network will require different methods to support the volume of connections to be monitored. Managing the migration and the coexistence of LTE alongside legacy networks is critical. Consequently fault reporting, design and measurement tools for the LTE access network will also need to:

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cover the extension of IP from the core to the access network, support the increasing number and variety of devices, as well as the different brands, device models and versions, and provide predictive service assurance across a full suite of services.

In addition, a single, central view of the customer and a single data model with also help with service activation and monitoring at an individual level.

Activation and provisioning LTE will allow bundled services to be provisioned and activated, but that does mean order orchestration and order flows will become more challenging. Enhanced service inventory will be required to manage more structured product and service catalogues. CSPs must ensure that all the devices it intends to support on its LTE network have been tested. Device and application certification and testing gives the CSP greater control of the potential impacts their introduction will have on traffic loads and signalling. LTE service parameters need to be added to the HLR, and from the HLR, the CSP can provision its new LTE subscribers. Over time, the HLR will be upgraded or replaced by a home subscriber server (HSS) to operate in an IMS environment and a wider range of subscriber parameters. The HSS holds and manages profiles on subscribers and devices; it holds authentication and authorisation of the bearer and access point, to manage QoS for LTE and IMS. In terms of the customer profiles, enhanced features will be required to allow for dynamic changes to customer profiles, and for policy management to enforce personalised quality of service levels. The CSP must ensure it maps across an existing customer’s profile and retains the context. Getting this process wrong causes customer backlash. When EE launched its LTE service in the UK it was hit with bad press. Customers found that as they were upgraded to EE’s LTE network, their 3G accounts on the Orange and T-Mobile brands were closed, but the new details were not transferred across to a new EE branded account, leaving some customers without any kind of service for up to seven days. Clearly this had as much to do with integrating siloed systems across networks as with introducing LTE, but as more CSPs share infrastructure, it is a factor for consideration.

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IMPACT ON BSS As previously noted, it is the services that CSPs want to offer using LTE that is going to drive change. Traditional BSS systems were built to deal with voice and simple data, so the characteristics of services that can be delivered by high speed broadband mobile data, and the associated network signaling traffic, will force changes in the BSS. The current market drivers see increased traffic volumes not only as a result of more devices attaching to networks, but because more people will view online and transact more frequently and will run multiple, concurrent (data) sessions from a single or multiple devices. Additionally, the majority of transactions are moving from long to short durations, with personalised rather than standardised features, services and tariff profiles. In terms of the impact of LTE on BSS platforms. Figure 3 outlines some of the key considerations for LTE ready BSS solutions. There are three domains and process areas to focus on: • Billing and revenue management • Charging, rating and policy management, and • Partner management and settlement.

Billing and revenue management High speed mobile broadband requires converged pre- and postpaid billing with a real-time and online capability. As highlighted above, billing in the LTE world has to accommodate the type of content, duration of usage, authenticate the user, and enforce charging parameters. The volume of customer data records (CDRs) that will need processing will be huge, so the BSS will need to be highly flexible in order to process these volumes as well as the various pricing models associated with each user such as subscription-, application-, tiered- or usagebased). In the LTE world, services and products can come and go quicker than legacy BSS can get them online. However if an OTT provider can launch and upgrade an app through an app store on a quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily basis, CSPs need to drive down their own concept to launch processes. Registering and retiring products has to become a faster process, and CSPs need to be able to make the most of opportunities as they present themselves, and this has implications for other parts of the BSS solutions too. Order fulfillment and orchestration, another BSS component, needs accurate network inventory data in the OSS to draw on.

Source: Ovum

Figure 3. Key consideration for impact of LTE on BSS systems

In addition to the inventory of network elements, all products and services need to be held and maintained in a similar manner. The centralised product and service catalogues allow reuse of predefined products and services to design additional propositions and personalised offers. CSPs can launch multiple LTE plans for various service bundles and personalise the experience levels around it, and do so quickly. All new offers need to be contained in a single, converged, realtime bill to the customer, but with multiple payment options, service and support channels, and encompassing a wider ecosystem. Importantly the information shown in the bill, has to mean something to the customer – charges per Mbps or Gbps are unclear and only generate inbound queries to contact centres. While part of the responsibility falls to the sales and onboarding stages in the customer lifecycle, customers need to understand the impact of what they consume. Unlimited data is less common in the LTE world, and even if it is used, there are generally exceptions and limits. Billing and revenue management help customers track their usage, and generate alerts as customers approach predefined thresholds set by the customer. As CSPs work to deliver a greater number of services with enhanced functionality, they must pay equal attention to the customer support structure. While all customer support channels are impacted and important, it is the online selfservice channels where some of the greatest gains can be made in terms of cost savings and improved customers experience. Managing the customer, and by implication, the revenue, can be one of the more complex aspects to integrate, as it requires real-time activity in terms of responses and notifications, as well as synchronising the app on a variety of interfaces. Some vendors are choosing to offer a pre-integrated LTE revenue and customer management platform, comprising converged billing, care and online charging along with evolved packet core components such as PCRF, DSC and triple A.

Charging, rating and policy management For the new pricing models of the IP and LTE world, charging, rating and policy have to be real-time, and integrated with the network elements via standardised Diameter interfaces for authentication, authorisation and accounting. IP-based pricing models enable personalised plans that support CSPs’ loyalty and marketing programmes, as well as the shared family plans. Where plans are shared there will be a combination of pre- and

postpaid accounts with bolts-on for social networking, gaming and video downloads, as well as personalised and parental control for the plan. Also to ensure that data usage does not exceed any pre-agreed thresholds, CSPs can use policy charging and rules function (PCRF) to ensure fair usage, but the charging and billing systems need to be fast and accurate. Policy and charging is an area where work on standards is already taking place. The policy and charging control (PCC) function in the LTE network enhances 3GPP capabilities to deliver dynamic control of policy and charging on a per subscriber and per IP flow basis. The LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) includes a PCC architecture that supports detailed QoS and allows application servers control quality and charging requirements dynamically for the services delivered, including roaming. The LTE PCC functions include: • policy and charging rules function (PCRF). • policy and charging enforcement function (PCEF), which enforces PCRF rules, measures usage, and supports charging. • online charging system (OCS), which manages the account status in terms of duration, volume, chargeable events. • off-line charging system (OFCS), which generates the a record of the customer’s charges to pass on to the billing systems.

Partner management and settlement The nature of the services that CSPs intend to deliver over LTE includes a broad ecosystem of partners and application developer, and the BSS has to support and manage the partner environment. So not only does the CSP need to keep track of the rapid turnover in its own products, service and applications, it has to do the same for third party service providers too. The CSP should: • test third party apps work in its LTE network and ensure that it doesn’t degrade network and service performance in anyway. • determine how it will handle incoming customer queries about the app – does it triage, offer full support, or pass it straight through to the third party on a freephone or premium number; whether the app will be linked to any self-service portal. • charge and bill the customer for the service, if appropriate, on behalf of the third party, and attribute revenue split. This mean a complex web of physical and logical connections and dependencies need to be closely managed by the BSS and OSS.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 4. Mapping the network centric capabilities to operational process capabilities

Industry standards

CONCLUSION

The move to open and/or industry standards can mitigate some of the OSS and BSS transformation risks associated with next generation network upgrades. The large installed legacy base means that changes will take time, and new customer-centric operating and business models need accommodating. If we look to the technical or network centric capabilities of OSS and BSS (as defined by the ISO OSI Telecommunications Network Management), it encompasses five management domains we have explored here. These in turn map on to five operational processes areas as identified by the TM Forum Frameworx integrated business architecture, see Figure 4.

The OSS and BSS are business critical systems that assure LTE network capacity, service quality, and enforce charging parameters for the high speed mobile broadband services. Ensuring real-time service delivery and a seamless customer experience requires agility and flexibility and greater levels of automation.

Frameworx provides the blueprint for a service oriented approach for rationalising operational IT, processes and systems required for the LTE and digital environment. It includes the common reference models, language, process architecture, and a frame work for service oriented support tools and standard interfaces. This means changes to the OSS and BSS can become simple and flexible enough to support the burgeoning demands of LTE as well as other IP technologies. The TM Forum Frameworx includes the Business Process Framework (eTOM), the Information Framework (SID), the Application Framework (TAM) and the Integration Framework for architecture and standard interfaces.

The LTE business cases, along with that for SDN and NFV for example, are predicated on lower opex â&#x20AC;&#x201C; simplified and automated systems for product develop and management, and faster time to market. These capabilities and abilities reside in CSPs OSS/BSS systems. In the future, OSS and BSS will need to be more closely with integrated customer management systems and business intelligence tools to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities of the on-demand of the digital lifestyle.

About Ovum Ovum provides clients with independent and objective analysis that enables them to make better business and technology decisions. Its research draws upon over 400,000 interviews each year with business and technology, telecoms and sourcing decision-makers, giving Ovum and its clients unparalleled insight, not only into business requirements but also the technology that organisations must support. Ovum is an Informa business. www.ovum.com

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Company summary JDSU provides communications test, measurement, monitoring and optical products and solutions for CSPs. Through its network and service enable business segment, the company is reinventing itself from being a provider of testing instruments to providing software solutions that enhance CSPs’ visibility across the entire mobile technology lifecycle, and throughout the network stack, including service and application performance. JDSU has strengthened its position as a provider of real-time intelligence through acquisitions. These include Agilent’s Network Solutions Test business for service assurance; Arieso, for RAN geo-location visibility, and its most recent acquisitions of Network Instruments for application-aware network visibility, and Trendium for 4G/LTE customer experience assurance and real-time network, service and customer intelligence. JDSU is headquartered in Milpitas, California, USA and employs about 4,900 employees. The company also provides services such as consulting, maintenance, training and managed services that address the customer’s needs. Its customer base includes CSPs, NEPs and government bodies.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE JDSU’s OSS portfolio enables CSPs to gain a deeper visibility of the network through testing, troubleshooting, performance management and service level agreement monitoring for advanced mobile technologies like LTE. These capabilities are achieved by collecting, correlating, mediating and calculating data from multiple data sources and by using a reporting engine which analyses the data to provide actionable insights to applications from JDSU and third party analytics providers. JDSU’s offerings include: • •

Network Enablement Solutions JDSU’s testing portfolio which determines the integrity and the interoperability of the networks elements. These products include JDSU’s RF Test, Network Protocol Test, and Backhaul and Fibre Optic Test tools. Service Enablement Solutions deliver real-time intelligence and ensure service quality and customer experience. They are embedded network systems which include data access agents and applications that collect and analyse data across the entire network to reveal the true customer experience which is so important for the high speed mobile data worlds of LTE. Products include JDSU’s real-time intelligence platform, customer experience assurance applications for mobile voice and data, small cell assurance solutions, and geolocation solutions for 2G, 3G and LTE Radio access technologies.

Key differentiation JDSU has a full set of OSS solutions covering the 2G, 3G and LTE and the migrations between technologies. It has a broad portfolio of network, service and customer intelligence solutions that covers performance monitoring from handset to the core network and from the physical layer to application layer. These solutions have the ability to collect and mediate data from its own data sources and that of third parties and openly feed the data to any OSS system with unique real-time insight. This maximises CSPs’ OSS investment and reduces costs associated with managing multiple OSS platforms. The acquisition of Trendium delivers a unique solution for assuring the quality of complex 4G/LTE services like VoLTE, while Arieso’s geolocation data for all subscriber calls, allows CSPs to optimise network planning and resource allocation.

Competitive pressures JDSU could face competitive pressures from companies with broader OSS and customer portfolios. Other companies that provide assurance and customer care capabilities built into their portfolio could threaten JDSU’s propositions. In addition, JDSU is dependent on a few customers for a significant portion of its revenue. A reduction in demand from these customers could affect the company’s revenues.

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Company summary Established in 1982, Amdocs specialises in software and IT services for CSPs. Its core products sit within OSS/BSS, CRM and network-control domains and services wrap around these products. The company has strengthened its OSS/BSS portfolio through acquisitions such as Bridgewater Systems, Actix, Celcite, Nortel’s Clarify CRM system and Cramer Systems' OSS solution. Headquartered in Chesterfield, MO, United States, Amdocs employs over 20,500 employees. Its customer base includes the top 10 largest mobile operators, and a number of major cable and satellite providers, such as AT&T, China Mobile, Telefónica and Vodafone.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE Amdocs has mapped its OSS/BSS capabilities into the key phases of a CSP’s LTE lifecycle – plan, build, launch, monetise and management of LTE networks. Key solutions include: •

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Amdocs Inventory and Discovery: includes Amdocs Resource Manager (ARM) that creates a record of network assets and the interdependencies between network elements in the denser LTE network. With information held on network elements updated using the Amdocs data manager, CSPs can make real-time assessment of their current resources as they rollout networks such as LTE. Amdocs LTE Network Planning and Build optimiser: uses templates within its network and capacity planning tools to support rapid rollout out of LTE network resources. By creating capacity thresholds using these tools, CSPs can avoid the occurrence of bottlenecks during network rollouts. Amdocs Small Cell solution: This solution provides a catalogue driven planning, engineering and design approach to support fast and efficient rollout of LTE small cells. The solution uses a unique “Design once, deploy many times” approach to re-use standard network designs to support project plans. Amdocs BSS Pack: This is an LTE-ready offer that includes Amdocs Revenue Management solutions for real-time convergent charging, billing, mediation, policy management and partner management. Amdocs’ Proactive care offering enables an agile approach to customer service and support delivery. Multichannel Self-service: This solution enables CSPs to create self-care capabilities such as checking billing and usage, and deliver the personalised support services to consumers that will be required in the LTE world.

Key differentiation Supporting its CSPs in improving customer experience is central to Amdocs’ messaging, which is extended through acquisitions like Actix which enhance its network optimisation capabilities. Amdocs’ integrated billing and policy management with the CRM provides a 360 degree customer view, and its BSS portfolio enables bundled services from OTT providers and its traditional services.

Competitive pressures Amdocs is actively focused on the winning more deals with the top tier CSPs which puts the company in competition with other companies looking to target the same market. The company’s solutions could attract the lower tiered CSPs given their need to compete with the incumbents. The integration of capabilities from its newly acquired assets such as Actix should be undertaken swiftly, so that Amdocs has minimal distraction as it focuses on opportunities in this space.

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Company profile Tektronix Communications portfolio includes offerings for service assurance and monitoring, and network intelligence and test solutions along with professional services offering support a range of architectures and applications such as LTE, HSPA, 3G, IMS, mobile broadband, VoIP, video and triple play. Headquartered in Plano, Texas Tektronix Communications is part of the Danaher Group. It has 1,400 employees worldwide with development centres in China, Italy, Ireland, Germany and the US.

OSS credentials The Tektronix Communications portfolio includes: • • • • •

Customer care solutions: Proactive customer care lets a CSP notify its customers with solutions so they don't have to call customer care in the first place. It facilitates CSPs to become proactive rather than reactive. AAA/Policy/Services: Validates and assures all aspects of CSPs’ services offering. Analyses underlying policies and charging transactions with real-time visibility, correlation and alarms needed for a reliable services infrastructure. Media Assurance: This provides a deep dive into media service offerings so that CSPs can provide customers with the highest possible quality of experience. Radio Access: The RAN solutions extend out to the cell site, extracting valuable data, to ensure that CSPs can troubleshoot, optimise, and plan ahead. Core Network: The core network applications help reduce outages, speed up time to resolution, and improve network quality – all managed by one system.

In addition, Tektronix Communications also provides a strong professional services offering that covers technical consulting, business consulting, application services, managed services, training and telecoms certification.

Key differentiators Tektronix Communications’ end-to-end portfolio covers all dimensions of the CSP: operations, engineering and planning, customer care and business. The portfolio gives CSPs the end-to-end visibility and insight to provide the highest levels of LTE performance. The data enablement solutions and services allow CSPs to use big data to drive a variety of efficiency and monetisation use cases across a variety of departments.

Competitive pressures The competition among OSS/BSS providers is becoming stiff as the marketplace becomes more crowded with look-alike products. Many IT and network vendors are making investments to understand the customer experience at the network level, so Tektronix Communications will have to make continuous investments in R&D and partnering efforts to stay ahead of the game. Also, Tektronix Communications’ ability to drive overall mobile operator OSS/BSS transformation projects can prove limited due to its lack of BSS portfolio.

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Company summary Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Wipro provides CSPs with a full range of outsourcing services, covering software and IT systems and platforms, network services, business process operations, and consulting. In its fiscal year 2013, Wipro’s revenue reached US$6.9bn, and its global media and telecoms (GMT) vertical accounted for 14% of revenues. The company employs 145,000 staff and has over 900 customers in 61 countries. It faces competition from some of the largest suppliers in the telecoms vertical including NEPs such as Ericsson, NSN, and more frequently Accenture, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Tech Mahindra, as well as HP and IBM.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE Wipro’s flagship offer in the OSS/BSS space is its RAPIDS framework (Rapid Application Integration & Deployment Solution), which provides CSPs with an integrated suite of best-in-class OSS/BSS systems. RAPIDS is a deployable framework with business process library, an end to end integration framework, with an LTE specific business use-cases and application stack. The stack is largely built around Oracle applications, plus additional applications. RAPIDS is one part of a full suite of platforms that support the delivery of network services that can also be used for LTE, the portfolio includes: • • • • •

Wipro Rapids is a suite of OSS/BSS systems built to support customer service transformation and product innovation. Wipro Accelerate comprises systems, processes, and operations to improve the launch of pre-paid services. Wipro ServiceNXT is Wipro's integrated managed services offering designed to achieve IT resilience and cost efficiencies. Wipro's customer experience management framework and customer-agent solution enables the measurement, visualisation, and optimisation of a customer's network experience. Wipro Small Cells and Converged Core platform enables the development of LTE Evolved Packet Core systems for public safety, defence, enterprises and rural markets.

Key differentiation One of the aspects that makes LTE so appealing to CSPs is the types of services that they can offer to customers. The richness of data and depth of content that can be offered by a broad ecosystem of partners and application developers provides an appealing and addictive bundle of services and content to customers. However, the CSP has to be able to use this content to design and deliver differentiated services, and then charge and bill for the services and attribute the revenue split across partners. This means a complex web of physical and logical connections and dependencies need to be closely managed by the BSS and OSS so that the CSP can monetise the opportunities. Wipro has designed an end-to-end solution that optimises LTE network and IT infrastructure with monetisation in mind.

Competitive pressures Wipro faces competition from NEPs, ITS players and systems integrators competing in the telecom vertical. However it has long standing partnerships with Amdocs and Oracle, who have extensive OSS and BSS portfolios, and Wipro’s pre-integrated RAPIDS stack has had particular appeal with greenfield mobile operators and Tier 2 and 3 CSPs in emerging markets for 2G and 3G rollouts. They should be well placed to do the same with LTE.

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The new paradigm of Customer Experience Assurance for 4G/LTE CSPs: It’s time for a new assurance paradigm that drives substantial increases in customer satisfaction and addresses the pain caused by the mobile broadband explosion, writes Edoardo Rizzi

T The author, Edoardo Rizzi, is vice president and general manager of Mobile Assurance and Analytics at JDSU

he era of LTE is here, and after many years of investing in customer experience management (CEM) initiatives, communications service providers (CSPs) still lack the means and systematic approach to drive meaningful improvements in customer experience. The complexity, cost, and footprint of current assurance solutions is growing exponentially alongside the amount of traffic, resulting in solutions that can’t scale, technically or financially, to address the mobile broadband explosion. This compromises CEM solutions that rely on underlying assurance systems. There is also a wide misperception in the industry that CEM and customer experience assurance (CEA) are one and the same. They are not.

What is CEA — and how is it new? We define CEA as a combination of the process, actions, and effort used to ensure that users of communications services receive a consistently good and increasingly better experience according to their unique expectations. Achieving that level of assurance will create loyal customers who are willing to advocate for their provider and are unlikely to churn to the competition or worse, become detractors.

Current solutions for assurance and CEM are combinations of a data collection solution and a socalled CEM application. Typically, two separate vendors deliver the combined solution, or one vendor patches together a data collection solution and a CEM application. The end result is a fragmented solution that does not scale and fails to meet stakeholders’ requirements and the need for true CEA data. Vendors are also struggling to deliver assurance solutions that provide data integrity and scalability for data collection solutions. Contextual real-time data is necessary in order to support network and service assurance in an all-IP, heterogeneous network. CSPs must proactively identify and resolve, in real-time, the biggest issues impacting the largest number of subscribers and the most valuable customers, all before customer satisfaction is impacted. Existing solutions that were designed to provide reactive troubleshooting in response to a customer complaint or network alarm do not provide true CEA capabilities. In addition, the perceived value in terms of accuracy, thoroughness, and causality of the CEM application is overshadowed by the deficiencies of the data collection system itself. Service providers around the world have tried to address the issue of CEA in a way that has resulted in a data collection scalability problem arising from the use of:

www.jdsu.com

CEA is a term not yet widely applied with respect to how CSPs manage their network performance and service assurance activities to ensure subscriber satisfaction. Traditionally, network performance and service assurance have been managed independently using separate systems. In addition, CEM solutions usually depend on underlying network performance

and service assurance systems for data.

• Obsolete techniques for network and service

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assurance in order to produce the data needed by the CEM applications that sit on top • So-called CEM applications that were created and tailored to underlying data collection platforms and therefore, by design, continue to inherently impose requirements that prevent those platforms from innovating Current solutions for assurance carry the perception of having the ability to be 100% correct and derive 100% exact conclusions. However, the network is growing faster than solutions can scale, resulting in incomplete coverage and unreliable access to the desired assurance data and information that feeds a CEM solution. This leaves service providers in a position where none of the collected information is statistically relevant and meaningful, and compromises their ability to systematically improve customer satisfaction or leverage assurance systems for reliable CEM data. To solve these problems, one has to address assurance in a fundamentally different manner.

The effectiveness of an assurance solution should not be measured by the degree of causality in the data it produces or the number of detailed call or session records generated. Instead, it should be measured by the degree to which the generated customer experience data, along with the issues that are made visible, can be correlated to an actual underlying network, service, or other problem in a statistically relevant way. When this is true, one can conclude that customers are indeed being negatively impacted and it is, therefore, worth spending time and money to solve underlying problems.

The big data opportunity A direct benefit of the new CEA paradigm is a data collection solution capable of enabling the service provider to capture the big data opportunity in a statistically-relevant, cost-efficient, scalable, and realtime manner. LTE, SDN, and SON technologies make assets more usable, efficient, and scalable, and put service providers in a position to innovate faster and at a much lower cost.

The effectiveness of an assurance solution should be measured by the degree to which the generated customer experience data, along with the issues that are made visible, can be correlated to an actual underlying network, service, or other problem in a statistically relevant way

The solution: A new CEA paradigm In today’s environment, seeing the network and services with the eyes of the customer can only be achieved if network and service assurance applications are initially designed with the customer in mind. Applications must address the constraints of CSPs with respect to cost, footprint, and scalability. CEA must integrate previously separate network and service assurance activities. The reality is that network, service and CEA are one and the same. Additionally, the evolution to dynamic networks, services, and performance requires CEA solutions that deliver a significant improvement to the concept of real-time, measured on the order of seconds and not minutes. Furthermore, CEA solutions must scale to address the magnitude of the mobile broadband wave so that the solution cost, complexity, and footprint are decoupled from the mobile broadband traffic growth curve both in terms of the speed of growth and absolute figures – all while increasing customer satisfaction. Last, but not least, next-generation solutions for data collection and CEA must be designed in a way that they can be virtualised both in terms of their data collection capabilities and the data mediation and correlation platform. This will enable CSPs to fully execute and capitalise on their cloud and virtualisation strategies.

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In this environment, real-time context awareness becomes key for the purpose of effective asset optimisation and monetisation of big data. The ability to see and understand the present situation becomes paramount in order to detect key events as they happen, and to uncover correlations between events that are only visible or valuable during a finite time span.

Embracing change To embrace CEA and the value it offers, one has to let go of obsolete practices. As L. Gordon Crovitz said in a recent Wall Street Journal article in reference to big data, “society will need to shed some of its obsessions for causality in exchange for simple correlation: not knowing why but only what.” In other words, it’s less about explaining the science behind the observed data, it’s about quickly identifying patterns and events that are statistically and significantly relevant. This is what the new CEA paradigm lets CSPs achieve, effectively and efficiently. For CSPs to address both the challenges and opportunities driven by 4G/LTE and the mobile broadband explosion, a fundamentally different “customer-centric” approach to assurance is inevitable. The sooner the new CEA paradigm is embraced, the sooner real improvements in customer satisfaction – and profitability – can be realized.

OSS/BSS FOR 4G

LTE is a mixture of evolution, revolution and devolution LTE promises improvements on so many levels – but communications service providers (CSPs) need help deciding which level to start improving first, writes Nick Booth here are so many differences involved in the shift from 3G to 4G that some might question whether Long Term Evolution (LTE) violates the Trades Descriptions Act. It seems more like a revolutionary technology, which calls for a complete overhaul on every aspect from BSS to backhaul, say experts.

T Freddie Kavanagh: OSS/BSS tools in at the start of LTE

Uri Gurevitz: CSPs are relying on Excel spreadsheets

While CSPs seek a better understanding of the subscriber experience as they roll out LTE, the focus is on managing the customer experience, says Kavanagh. So 4G business and operational systems must create full network visibility and help CSPs in the endless pursuit of higher speeds and improved network quality. “The alternative is to hire more skilled customer care reps, but this is a more expensive option,” says Kavanagh. Ultimately, the right BSS/OSS strategy and customer experience tools could help mobile operators create conditions where the subscribers look after themselves.

Until the bigger players start snapping up their smaller rivals, be prepared for hetnet conditions, says Tara Van Unen, JDSU’s marketing manager. Get used to more complexity. Before you can create the quality of service your subscribers you will have to deal with equipment from many vendors and create common signals and data planes, predicts Van Unen. Many CSPs are struggling with 4G capable devices that get stuck on the 3G layer of the network. The 4G network is oblivious to these occurrences, which will obviously affect the 4G customer experience. “There are no 4G customers, only customers who have paid for the right to experience the promise of 4G services, who are of course actually being served by a combination of the 4G, 3G and possibly even the 2G networks,” says Van Unen.

The rollout of 4G has been very different to 3G or GPRS, says Freddie Kavanagh, vice president of applications solutions at Tektronix Communications. In previous generations of rollout the budgets for monitoring came after the investment on network equipment and rollouts was complete. This time, CSPs are buying their business and operational support tools while they are testing their LTE rollouts, and then continuing to use them as their networks go live.

The differences in the underlying transport service are pretty revolutionary too, says Nan Chen, co-founder of Cenx. The backhaul changes from Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to carrier ethernet transport services in 4G networks. While TDM cannot be oversubscribed, ethernet can - and trying to force fit the former’s OSS to the latter network type will end in failure. “Today’s OSS were built with an underlying assumption that the network is relatively homogenous,” says Chen. But LTE, like any disruptive technology, takes us into the inevitable heterogeneity of a new and immature market.

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CSPs should beware of the re-positioned legacy OSS/BSS solutions on the market, as they won’t scale to support new networks cost effectively. The diversity of vendor technology in the network will also create challenges for CSPs as they plan capacity and coverage. The good news is that the two disciplines are now completely separate, which simplifies things a little, but capacity planning has got more complex. The 4G CSP needs to understand the exact location of the small portion of users consuming all the data and place small cell resources close to those areas. Many CSPs should consider 4G from a pure monetisation perspective, says Jonjie Sena, vice president of marketing at Aircom International. “There isn’t enough money in all the world to create a 4G network that gives everything that’s possible to everybody,” says Sena, “so measure the business impact, not the bits and bytes. By that I mean measure the effect of an event on the value you give to customers. You have to prioritise that.” A good discipline, for anyone who wants to use operational tools to manage 4G networks, is to remember the mistakes of previous customer tools like CRM, says Redknee's CTO, James DeMarco. “We have to use [OSS/BSS] tools to shield the complexity of what’s going on underneath from the subscribers,” he says. The end user doesn’t care how their film is VanillaPlus

delivered, they just want to see it, he says. In some ways, LTE is creating a devolution, reports Uri Gurevitz, the director of portfolio marketing at Amdocs. The automated planning of networks has been replaced by manual systems. “Most CSPs need a system for planning LTE networks but few have an automated planning tool for the roll out of services. They use Excel in many cases,” says Gurevitiz. Chen, of CENX, confirms that Excel spreadsheets have become the OSS tool of choice as many CSPs make do in the management of their cell sites, addressing and topology in their 4G network. There are complex choices ahead for CSPs, as they have a legacy of old networks and backhaul systems – such as 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi – and a new system that has to be overlaid. But that’s no excuse for going backwards.

Nan Chen: CSPs are trying to make do with what they’ve got

James DeMarco: OSS/BSS tools shield the complexity

LTE and VoLTE are driving next generation policy control As CSPs move to offer voice over their LTE networks policy control becomes mandatory. Here, Shannon Bell explains why ith over 200 commercial long-term evolution (LTE) deployments globally, communications service providers (CSPs) are now looking at how to drive additional revenue from service offerings on their LTE networks, and voice is the next application that is making the move to LTE. Policy control is a mandatory component in delivering voice over LTE (VoLTE) services. And with the introduction of VoLTE, comes a new set of requirements for policy control solutions.

W The author, Shannon Bell, is director of marketing and business development for Data Experience at Amdocs

The implications of LTE and VoLTE are driving a new set of requirements for policy that will enable greater flexibility and service agility for CSPs. This is shown in Figure 1.

VoLTE for policy control With VoLTE, voice is now one component of an all-IP offering, whereas voice was previously the main service, and data and messaging services were the add-ons. With voice services now sharing the pipe with other data services like web browsing, video and social media, having the ability to manage the speed, quality and volume is critical to providing a differentiated experience for the subscriber.

As CSPs start to roll out VoLTE services, it is critical that they be able to offer not just a service that is comparable with existing voice offerings, but one that is differentiated and adds value to the customer’s service offering. And the offering must deliver monetisation benefits for the CSP. If we consider how VoLTE will be monetised, there are a number of options, including: • Bundled offers – Premium voice with data services • Time and volume offers – Charging per minute/second/byte • Location-based offers – Differentiating voice charging based on congestion hotspots versus geography • Tiered services – Quality of experience based on different packages and plans • Dynamic offers – Real-time value offerings promoted on a dynamic basis • Roaming offers – Tailored offerings based on partnerships In each of these cases, policy plays a key role in supporting the monetisation of VoLTE services. Through tiered service offerings, policy control defines and manages the tiers and quality of service associated with each tiered plan. In the case of dynamic offerings, policy enables the promotion of real-time value offerings on a dynamic basis. With location-based services, policy can use the location information to differentiate the offering based on

www.amdocs.com

These high quality, and in some cases high definition (HD), voice services will differentiate VoLTE from other over-the-top (OTT) applications and offer telco-grade service quality. It’s also possible to support premium offers with higher quality of service (QoS) and integrate voice with IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) applications,

including Rich Communication Services (RCS).

Monetisation of VoLTE

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congestion hotspots or geography. These are just a few examples of how policy can be used to drive monetisation of VoLTE.

Bundled data and VoLTE services If we consider a bundled service offering, our subscriber could have a silver tier data package that offers best effort QoS and also provides VoLTE services. When the subscriber surfs the internet and Facebook, they receive best effort QoS. When they make a voice call, their CSP sets up a dedicated bearer for the voice call and they are given guaranteed QoS to offer that “parity plus” experience with their traditional voice services. When the VoLTE call is completed, the dedicated bearer is disabled and the subscriber is provided with best effort QoS.

“If we consider a bundled service offering, our subscriber could have a silver tier data package that offers best effort QoS and also provides VoLTE services”

Figure 1: Implications of VoLTE

Towards enriched communications In the VoLTE context, policy gives CSPs the ability to deliver superior multi-media experiences and provide guaranteed quality voice/video/rich communication services. If we consider VoLTE as a first step towards enriched communications, we can envisage a future of service offerings where policy is an enabler of quality of service, and quality of experience truly becomes the differentiator. It can drive voice offerings, messaging, video and group communications, reachability and add-on services, and more; delivering a fully integrated LTE experience for not just voice, but all communications enabled by policy control, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: VoLTE as a step towards enriched communications

Deploying VoLTE With virtualised deployment options, CSPs can upgrade policy to meet the requirements for VoLTE and the enriched communication environment, as part of their transition to a fully virtualised network environment. CSPs can deploy a virtualised LTE network and provide regional or enterprise specific variations of VoLTE services to meet the needs of multiple customer segments and geographies. Virtualisation offers the flexibility not only to support VoLTE as an extension to LTE services, but to tailor the offering according to network demands, the corresponding performance and scalability needs, as well as quality of service requirements to deliver a truly differentiated experience.

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ROAMING AND CHARGING

LTE roaming challenges present CSPs with new opportunities The shift to bundling voice within a user's data allowance inevitably creates new challenges for the OSS/BSS systems used by CSPs. The transition is intensifying with the move to LTE, the model for which demands good service delivery along with accurate charging and roaming provision – there are also new opportunities for CSPs to exploit, writes Jonny Evans

or CSPs regulation and international agreements regarding roaming create additional challenges. In the European Union, CSPs are required to have billing systems that can handle a customer using a service while abroad. Such systems need to be able to identify and authorise that service use while also warning customers of any additional charges in order to avoid bill shock. This must be achieved in conjunction with the third-party network providing coverage to that customer at that time, and CSPs must achieve all this in realtime – while preserving any existing service level agreements. "The BSS needs to cope with these interactions between domestic and international networks all the time,” says Tony Jackson, the product manager for Singleview at CSG International. “Charging needs to be the same, so long as the customer requirement comes back to the home BSS, the home BSS is responsible for the customer report, spending and account details, for example." Mediation between the different BSS systems used across the combined infrastructure is the solution

LTE deployments aren't yet global, but the industry recognises that with voice becoming data, its future depends on services provision and the provision of new products. For example: • AT&T charges a premium price for 4G data bundles, but lets customers share the bandwidth between devices. • Vodafone in the UK offers free access to Spotify with some accounts. For CSPs, new service provision is a step toward mitigating revenues lost through bundling voice calls within data deals. Bundled service provision is attractive to customers because they don't waste money trawling around to buy services from multiple providers. The challenge is that: "Accurate billing and charging is going to become even more important in the near future," explains Robin Kent, director of European operations at Adax.

Gordon Rawling: CSPs must think from the outside in

most CSPs are coming round to in order to answer these complex challenges. "CSPs are also turning increasingly to managed services, such as the cloud-based managed services offered by IPX providers," notes Mikael Schachne, the vice president of global data at BICS.

This drive for accuracy is confounded by a change in business structure. "Legacy systems associated account payment with an entity, a phone, rather than a person there was no personalisation. These legacy systems can't cope with such shared deals [as offered by AT&T]," says Jackson. For Timo Ahomäki, the chief technology officer at Tecnotree: "One of the biggest challenges for incumbent operators will be to figure out how to handle convergence,” he says. “Typically, prepaid and post-paid, data and voice are operated on different systems." This means that as CSPs migrate to service-based deals they must identify ways by which to seamlessly integrate their back office systems. "The focus in terms of BSS should be to move away from tightly integrated monoliths to more loosely coupled suites, allowing mix-and-match service creation," Ahomäki adds. There's a new opportunity here for CSPs: "I think CSPs are trying to think on this from the outside in," says Gordon Rawling, the senior director of marketing at Oracle Communications. "They are thinking far more about the service experience they want to deliver and less from a cost basis." Some CSPs may soon begin offering cut-price roaming deals to customers on competing networks in order to exploit existing partnerships and infrastructure. LTE poses an additional challenge: As CSPs move

to include voice calls within data allowances, they must also manage the transition between 4G and 3G infrastructure. No CSP yet offers complete 4G coverage, meaning those voice calls can skip between 4G and 3G networks as a customer travels – this means that call may invoke multiple 4G and 3G service sessions. BSS systems must be capable of identifying those concurrent sessions that represent a single call in order to deliver accurate data metering. Once again the industry appears to be moving to managed service solutions, identifying those that can cooperate with their existing OSS/BSS while also enabling the granular, real-time insights their evolving business demands now and in the future. Managed services aren't always perfect. Some CSPs are already paying such service providers on a per use basis, "so a recurrent Facebook ping may not cost the customer much [under LTE data deals] but could cost the CSP," explains Jackson. What are service providers doing about this? "We are seeing a strategy of moving data demands away from those legacy platforms," he adds. Rawling warns the focus for the CSP transition towards service provision rather than old business models should not be the technical challenges, but the opportunity: "Where can you drive new revenue and deepen customer relationships?” he asks. “We need to think from the outside in; to consider how we are architecting our systems for a heterogeneous world at low implementation costs."

Timo Ahomäki: Handling convergence challenges CSPs

Robin Kent: Accurate billing and charging becomes more important

Integrated policy and charging delivers improved agility – and revenue generation As CSPs close in on the goal of making their operations more agile, the integration of policy and charging presents a key step in their transformational journeys, with accelerated time-tomarket for new services as a clear benefit, writes Petter Järtby

T The author, Petter Järtby, is head of business support systems at Ericsson

Although the most immediately apparent goal is timeto-market, CSPs are increasingly looking at aspects of system performance that increase revenue. In the past the focus would have been more on opex reduction with an additional interesting new revenue generation. Now, the balance between the two is equalising.

CSPs are still looking to gain efficiencies but there is a heightened recognition that to compete effectively they need the revenue generation aspects to be enabled as well. Perhaps the most important enabler of fast time-tomarket lies in having a flexible, agile environment borne on the concept of a single integrated stack for all services – fixed, mobile, consumer and business. Service agility spans a range of business processes: from service definition to order negotiation and fulfilment − to policy, charging, billing and assurance − and extending into service delivery. Clearly integration of charging and policy is not the end of that journey towards the agile CSP. There is growing interdependence between the two, so it makes sense

www.ericsson.com

he agile operator must be agile in all aspects: network agility, service agility and customer agility. Shortened time-to-market is the primary measure of service agility as it presents great financial benefit to CSPs. By being the first to bring a wide range of innovative new services to market, especially those that use third party assets, they strategically differentiate themselves, which allows them to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

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for CSPs to integrate them and create a streamlined relationship. We have seen that CSPs often prioritise charging and policy integration, making the gains that are detailed above, and then move on their programmes to encompass product management, order management and customer care – creating that unified database versus having siloes to be handled individually, can create delays and greater operational costs. In Ericsson’s deployments, customer CSPs have seen time-tomarket for new service introduction reduce from five or six months to one month. That achieves the benefits described above but it also enables the complex service propositions that CSPs are impelled to offer – for example, those that involve new business relationships to support digital and M2M services in a host of industry verticals. As the market develops further and a range of business models emerge, often relying on partners and over the top (OTT) players, the policy and charging models become more complex. We’ve seen relationships such as Singtel with WhatsApp or Telia with Spotify emerge and this is now no longer a one-way model. As a result, having the charging and policy flexibility is really important to the direct delivery of these services. The two or even threesided business models have more players involved and in these relationships it is even more important for the CSP and each partner to provide what has been promised. CSPs need the capability to set policy for individual users and individual services and need policy functionality that is more capable. In the LTE environment that will become even more important as policy is applied to the flatter, all-IP network resource of LTE. With the accelerated roll-out of LTE, the ability to guarantee a certain quality of service for a specific user or service is enhanced significantly by integrated policy and charging. This can enable CSPs to achieve real differentiation which has not been possible in the 3G environment. Importantly the architecture used for LTE in policy and charging, enforcement and other areas can additionally be used for 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi services. As a result, CSPs will be enabled to

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bundle and package together offerings that rely on multiple technologies. This is a big shift for CSPs. Typically their back office organisations have reflected the architecture they had but now the challenge is not only to integrate best of breed of technologies but to adjust their organisations to make full use of integrated policy and charging. CSPs are looking to move away from their siloed architectures and create a single stack for each functional area. Ericsson’s concept is to have a centralised product and service catalogue to drive the CSP’s business processes and, with its acquisition of catalogue specialist Conceptwave last year it sees the potential to drive catalogue functionality into the service creation environment. The advantage of the catalogue based approach is that once the components have been established and proven in one service type, they can be re-used for multiple related services. The building block approach thereby enables quick assembly of subcomponents to build out a new end-to-end service. Ericsson also applies the concept of true ‘componentisation’ that uses parameters in the specification of components. Parameters such as unit rate, discount percentages, discount and threshold limits can be established as parameters and defined in the rules set. Essentially, those can be identified in charging and policy and simply referred to in the catalogue as a particular parameter. Then the catalogue is called upon in real-time during fulfilment to provide the proper rule sets. Since the central catalogue defines the parameter, the CSP doesn’t need a policy or charging expert to enable the proposition. The end game is the lean, lithe, agile CSP with a back office composed end-to-end of integrated systems that are driven from a centralised product and service catalogue. The industry is already underway on that journey. Early adoption of integrated policy and charging is a critical step on that path that can deliver real, measurable efficiency and revenue advantages to operators.

A N A LY S I S

LTE to be deployed worldwide by 2018 LTE is out of the experimental stage and is being deployed worldwide. CSPs in all markets are in the process of implementing LTE, but the emergence of the APAC and LATAM regions is set to challenge European and North American CSPs’ early lead, reports Chris Nicoll, the head of Analysys Mason's Network Technologies and Enterprise and M2M research practices.

he first LTE deployments occurred in Finland and Sweden, and the world’s largest LTE network is in the USA, but emerging Asia Pacific and Latin America have the highest number of planned LTE networks, according to Analysys Mason’s Wireless networks tracker (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Operational and planned LTE networks by region, July, 2013 [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

Planned

Operational

Developed AsiaPacific

Central and Eastern Europe

Latin America

North America

Emerging AsiaPacific

Western Europe

India, Malaysia and Vietnam are the leaders in the emerging Asia Pacific region for the number of LTE networks planned

Our research indicates that 59 LTE network trials were in progress as of 31 July 2013. This figure includes cases where a CSP has multiple trials underway, but might not eventually deploy operational networks. However, we can reasonably expect – with more than 80% probability – that most of these trials will result in commercial deployment within the next two years.

Middle East and North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Numbers of networks

Emerging market countries are also taking advantage of LTE technology. India, Malaysia and Vietnam are the leaders in the emerging Asia Pacific region for the number of LTE networks planned. CSPs in India, Malaysia and Nepal are also planning to launch TDLTE networks. We expect several CSPs to deploy FD/TD-LTE networks in order to take advantage of their paired and unpaired spectrum. Ten dual-technology LTE networks are already in commercial operation.

Adoption of the Asia–Pacific Telecommunity Band Plan (APT700) in Brazil, Chile, Columbia and Mexico provides CSPs and users in the Latin America region with access to the worldwide LTE700 ecosystem, which offers a broad choice of equipment and terminals. The large number of frequencies that LTE supports has generated concern among industry players, but in practice CSPs often need to support fewer than seven in order to provide a wide range of services for their users.

The largest number of LTE network trials is in Central and Eastern Europe (26), emerging Asia Pacific (24) and Western Europe (20). Trials in the first two regions are being driven by adoption of the technology among regional CSPs, such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Infotel. Infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN), Samsung and ZTE are demonstrating the required network upgrade and transition options, including LTE overlay and single-RAN solutions. Strong support for LTE in Asia Pacific and Latin America will start to offset the early influence that European and North American CSPs – some of which have a two or three year head start on deploying the technology – have had on the device and network vendors. We expect a more-balanced global LTE market to emerge by 2018, in which markets such as Brazil, India and Russia will each account for 5% of LTE connections worldwide.

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V O LT E S E R V I C E A S S U R A N C E

Can CSPs control the VoLTE experience and profit from it? L

Voice in the LTE environment will neither be as bad as best effort VoIP nor – at least initially – as good as the high definition voice we’ve been promised, writes George Malim

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V O LT E S E R V I C E A S S U R A N C E

hen it comes to voice over LTE, the first step is to debunk the myth that VoLTE, because it will run over an allIP network, is somehow going to provide the same poor experience as voice over IP over the best effort internet. It is true that LTE is an all-IP architecture and it’s also true that OTT providers like Skype will offer VoIP services over LTE networks but those won’t be VoLTE services.

W Mark Windle: Operators can apply a very special grade of service

Ray Adensamer: The experience will go from crystal clear to nothing

The difference between VoIP delivered over LTE and VoLTE is that the mobile operator owns the network, owns the IP Mulitmedia Subsystem and can apply policy control to a VoLTE call to control and prioritise it. “People are familiar with relatively reliable mobile voice,” says Ray Adensamer, the senior manager of product marketing at Radisys. “It’s [thought of] as reliable because you get a ring tone but you also get poor cell coverage. The voice quality of a 3G cell can be quite poor in terms of fidelity, with VoLTE, you’ll notice an improvement.” Mark Windle, the head of marketing at OpenCloud, agrees: “The network operator is in control of the quality of service and I’m not sure they would want to provide that to VoIP providers,” he says. “They can apply a very special grade of service to the connection between the handset and the base station to guarantee bandwidth over the radio interface” Early VoLTE adopters such as SK Telecom in South Korea have already started marketing VoLTE as a benefit because it will provide greater call quality than 2G or 3G voice. To an extent, that’s true because the architectures of IMS have been thought through to give operators the necessary ability to control VoLTE calls. However, there is one aspect of VoLTE that presents a clear potential for the perception that the quality will be lower than earlier mobile voice technologies; it either works well or it doesn’t work at all. “With LTE, the network will be binary,” adds Adensamer. “The experience will go from crystal clear to nothing. I’m quite bullish, though. I believe the experiences I hear from early adopters that it’s a superior experience.” However, there are a significant number of challenges to VoLTE deployment. Obvious barriers include network roll-out delays and constrained

device availability but there are further challenges to surmount because of the fragmented spectrum being assigned to LTE networks in different countries and regions as well as different versions of LTE itself. That will make roaming hard to develop and, as a consequence, roaming VoLTE is likely to fall back to 2G and 3G for some time to come. Even so, those barriers are surmountable and, while roll-out will be slow it will happen and the benefits to operators will be substantial. “There are opportunities of nice integrations with rich communication services and hybrid voice and video,” says Adensamer. “The biggest benefit is that once you’ve moved voice from 3G to 4G you have all that 3G spectrum and can re-use to fuel 4G spectrum needs. The business case for VoLTE isn’t the millions [of operational savings] on IMS, it’s the billions on spectrum. This will be a big year for VoLTE.” Windle sees the opportunity for operators to move on from the standard voice calling of the last century. “Is it about replicating the 3G experience or do CSPs want to take the opportunity to start competing again?” he asks. “Is the user experience going to stay plain old telephony with very little innovation or is the opportunity in the move to all-IP networks?” Justin Paul, the head of marketing for the OSS division at Amdocs, doesn’t see the basic voice business changing much with VoLTE. “Do we see it enabling CSPs to upsell or reversing the trend in voice revenues – no, not for basic voice,” he says. “It becomes a commodity but there are opportunities around high definition voice and sponsored services.” “The real driver is spectrum refarming,” he adds. “The quality of voice may well be lower in the first instance because people will move from LTE to 3G to 2G and probably every time you hand over there’s a risk a call will be dropped because you tend to hand over on the edge of the performance envelope.” Even though the routine quality is likely to be greater in the VoLTE era, the journey towards it will therefore be a bumpy road as quality degrades where different technologies meet. In this light, VoLTE looks very much a case of one step back to take two steps forward and perhaps there is more in it for CSPs than for users.

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CLOCKING OFF

IT agnostic? If you don’t believe in technology you’re in the wrong job If telecoms engineers know one thing, it’s that syntax and protocols and standards must be upheld. There’s simply no scope to be IT agnostic, writes Nick Booth hat upholding of standards makes it unacceptable if switch vendor A makes a box that cannot be understood by handset B. The rules of engagement are broadly accepted and standardised. All vendors make gadgets that, if they were humans, would be singing from the same song sheet.

Those are the rules we impose on the hardware, software and technical specifications of the telecoms industry. The author, Nick Booth, is a contributor to VanillaPlus and a technology journalist

The telecoms industry should be setting an example to others on human interaction 52

It’s a pity we can’t follow those guidelines ourselves. Meanwhile, the machines we created are growing smarter by the day. Artificial intelligence means they can learn from their mistakes, and the Internet of Things will presumably allow them to pass their experiences on to each other. Pretty soon, there will come the revelation that all offspring experience and they will see right through us. Though we tell them to be exact about their terms and meanings, when it comes to applying these rules to ourselves, we are not so stringent. The machines will come to realise that we are complete and utter hypocrites. Why, a router might ask, does anyone claim to be IT agnostic? Even the dumbest device now has online access to several dictionaries, and they define an agnostic as someone who doubts the existence of something. Which would beg more questions from the Internet of Things that are becoming increasingly curious. Such as: Are you saying you are unsure whether you believe in the existence of technology? Are you sure you’re the right person for this job? How on earth can an agnostic also be an IT evangelist? Those machines would have a point too. There are

many terms in IT which promise the exact opposite of reality. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, for example, were actually about customer stalking. If there was a relationship involved, it was pretty one sided, with one party bombarding the other with constant unwanted phone calls and messages. If you buy a gadget from a company, it doesn’t mean you want a relationship with them. That’s the sort of obsessive misinterpretation that would normally end in a restraining order. The telecoms industry should be setting an example to others on human interaction. We shouldn’t talk about ‘leveragizing’ something when we really mean using it. That only confuses people. Just as we demand that machines keep their exchanges simple and unequivocal, surely we should be sticking to standard English. It’s not just laymen and women who get confused by artificially inflated terms. Even people in the industry are getting bamboozled. According to one company, 56% of all software defects can be traced back to a lack of communication between people working on a project. Testing issues and production defects stem from having misinterpreted the information, says the study by Grid Tools. Development teams don’t specify clearly what the testers should be testing for, says the firm. As we moved to the era of software defined networking, that is rather worrying. What’s software defined networking? I’m not sure – it all depends who you ask! You see what I mean? It’s the machines I feel sorry for. When their creators act like this they must be really confused.

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ISSN 1745-1736

February / March 2014 Volume 16 Issue 1

In an always-on, instant gratification world can CSPs meet users' expectations? Why service agility will enable CSPs with new business models

PLUS: CSPs become the enablers of the Internet of Things as they learn to collaborate and not just compete • Our CEO Guide to Mobile World Congress 2014 • Why 2014 has to be the year of intelligent data • Time to get to grips with the complexity of omni-channel big data • Analysys Mason on the importance of extending the customer lifecycle through effective CEM • visit www.vanillaplus.com

ericsson.com/realize

@EricssonOSSBSS

C O N T E N T S

Welcome to Barcelona! For many of us crammed onto budget airlines, traversing Europe to return to Barcelona is as much a fixture of our calendars as a child’s or wife’s birthday. We know the days will be long and the nights – at least the sleeping part – short, we know the distances covered on foot will be epic and refreshments scarce and taken on the move

n fact one colleague once said to me he has only two rules for Mobile World Congress: Eat whenever you are offered food because you don’t know when you will next be offered some and; Never get on a coach because that removes your right to self-determination when you find yourself stuck on the wrong side of town at a questionably relevant third-party developer’s briefing session. I’d broadly concur with those rules but I think the catering situation has improved – slightly – at the new venue, Fira Gran Via. I did see some green material in one sandwich last year, which I believe to have been lettuce. The coach question becomes almost irrelevant because, contrary to popular expectation, the rail transport to the venue worked very well last year. Regardless of the hardships of getting there, there’s a common thread for the nearly 70,000 of us that will attend this year. The vast majority of the opinion shapers, influencers and decision-makers of the industry will be in one place. There’s an energy to that, whether you’re trying to sell product, building your brand, looking for new partners, trying to recruit employees, or just finding a few hours to figure out what a particular three-letter acronym actually means.

This year the variety looks to be even greater with a wide range of people from outside telecoms set to attend. We’ll see car makers, hotel chains, banks and a raft of others at the event looking to build relationships with CSPs and telecoms vendors as industries seek to build mobile ecosystems, with mobile operators playing an increasingly important part. In fact, while challenges still exist in network planning and deployment, the story this year may not be about throughput and coverage, but collaboration and partnership. That would be a substantial change. However, I will be adhering to my friend’s Congress rules. If you offer me a canapé, I’ll say yes; if you offer me a ride on your coach, I’ll run for the metro. Enjoy your visit to the show! George Malim

IN THIS ISSUE TALKING HEADS Per Borgklint

C4 CSPs BECOME THE ENABLERS OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS This year’s Mobile World Congress will see CSPs more prepared than ever before to collaborate with other industries. George Malim previews the event

C5 TALKING HEADS

Per Borgklint, senior vice president and head of Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson tells VanillaPlus why CSPs must achieve agility to meet users’ great expectations

C10 EXPERT OPINION Antti Koskela explains why 2014 has to be the year of intelligent data for CSPs

C12 INTERVIEW Peter Conquest details the complexity CSPs face in dealing with the complexity of omni-channel big data

C14 ANALYSIS Patrick Kelly, research director at analyst firm Analysys Mason explores how CSPs are turning to value-based delivery support

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M W C

P R E V I E W

CSPs become the enablers of the Internet of Things This year’s Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona, Spain on 24-27 February 2014, will see a further strengthening of the relationships between CSPs and adjacent industries. VanillaPlus explores what’s in store for visitors and the likely themes of this year’s show ‘The direction of travel seems to be one of increased cooperation with the aim that all those involved benefit fairly”

lthough the telecoms industry has struggled to establish itself in the digital value chain for more than a decade, refreshed approaches to working with other industries are, at last, starting to bear fruit. CSPs have turned away from an attitude of trying to compete with everyone from banking, entertainment and the web industry, to recognising that the opportunity lies in where they can add value to the businesses of other industries. Perhaps the strongest indicator of that is that Mobile World Congress’s organisers the GSMA have attracted a broad range of senior speakers, not just from the old telecoms sector to present at the event. This year’s keynote presentation is to be given by the founder and chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. In the past CSPs have seen social media companies as competitors and it is significant that Zuckerberg has agreed to speak.

It might be too early to call what that tension will be replaced with but the direction of travel seems to be one of increased cooperation with the aim that all those involved benefit fairly from the value they provide. “Mobile World Congress 2014 is set to be our biggest, most ambitious and most diverse event yet, offering new experiences for attendees across the growing mobile ecosystem,” said Michael O’Hara, the chief marketing officer of the GSMA, on announcing Zuckerberg’s participation. “Over four days, attendees will have the opportunity to see just how broadly mobile is impacting our everyday lives, how we work, live and play. We’re looking forward to seeing the mobile world gather in Barcelona.”

Facebook is increasingly a mobile medium and

Zuckerberg’s willingness to participate at the event demonstrates the extent to which he sees the mobile industry as important to his business. The fact a CSP member organisation has invited him to speak demonstrates that the competitive tension between social media companies and CSPs is also dissipating.

Continued on page C8 C4

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Per Borgklint: CSPs must respond to the new and complex demands on their systems

CSPs must achieve agility to meet subscribers’ rising expectations

SPs continue to strive to serve users’ ever-increasing expectations for instant gratification. Consumers and enterprises alike want a wider range of personalised services concurrent with higher speeds, greater capacity and improved coverage, and CPSs are doubly challenged by the need to solidify their role in the digital value chain. Continued focus on improving service agility will address large parts of the challenge, along with systems that help to manage new lines of business, Per Borgklint, senior vice president and head of Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson tells VanillaPlus VanillaPlus: What are your CSP customers around the world seeing as the trends in mobility?

will see the mobile phone as a very broad service enablement environment.

Per Borgklint: Fantastic growth in mobile broadband and the continued enormous growth of OTT services into new markets and third world countries is creating demand for services both in high and low ARPU countries. The speed of movement is also incredible in terms of how individuals’ requirements are changing. Agility and time to market are becoming key requirements that service providers must meet.

The device will be the ultimate personal thing that connects users. This creates complexity and requirements on the solutions and systems that make it possible for me as an individual to have services rendered in a way that I want – and that will be different to what my wife, my children, my friends and my colleagues choose for themselves.

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The expectation is that everything I do happens immediately. This only continues to become more complex as people are becoming more and more obsessed with their mobile phones. Research from Ericsson Consumer Lab has found that users are bringing their own broadband device to work and that

What is shaping this but is not necessarily seen is that mobile devices and infrastructure are going from a single or dual solution to a multi-solution environment to one with very broad service agility. OTT services will not only be over-the-top but through-the-top and we

TA L K I N G H E A D S

city dwellers and women are relentlessly driving the smartphone market. These are just some of the trends that are shaping the always-on mobile market in which instant gratification is the expectation. For individuals to have services rendered in a way that they want, CSPs must respond to the new and complex demands on their solutions and systems. With competition coming from every angle, CSPs are very concerned about their ability to meet these demands. VP: What are the biggest most challenging implications for CSPs in the face of these trends? PB: Experience, efficiency and innovation. Being able to meet timeto-market expectations can only be accomplished with the right people and efficient processes. That’s critical to achieving CSP agility in the networked society’s hyper-competitive, ultrademanding yet decreasingly loyal market. CSPs need to become more agile in order to compete across multiple service layers. They have to be able to package services for convenience and then deliver an experience that is quick and efficient at a cost that users are willing to pay. What we are seeing, working with our customers, is that more and more they require automated, configurable, simple, straightforward solutions that achieve fast time-to-market to enable them to be competitive and meet new market demands. It doesn’t matter if a solution is on the network, service or customer side, it needs to be seamless on all sides and fully address CSP opex and capex constraints. They must first achieve network agility. In the network there is the requirement to accelerate the planning, roll-out, integration and optimisation of new and existing networks. That increases both the technological and organisational complexity from planning to provisioning. Service agility is definitely one of the areas where CSPs can personalise the experience they offer and go from idea to implementation via an automated, seamless process. It is possible to roll-out and create service features in minutes that users will be able to see on their phones. We support our customers with automated product lifecycle management – from development of the initial product concept, selection of technology, updating systems and processes, and the creation of a roll-out plan for any new offer, through to phasing it out. Our solutions automate a wide range of processes, from lead to cash, to greatly reduce cost and decrease time to revenue. Our agile system allows a CSP to generate and manage sales leads. This extends from receiving a customer order to delivering the service for use, including activation and policy allocation. Our customers have achieved very high throughput and have minimised manual touch points to lower delivery costs with substantially reduced order errors and associated handling costs. Our systems also allow CSPs to manage financial services in realtime, including capturing use of a service and the associated events and converting them into monetised or chargeable items. Ericsson's solutions let CSPs reduce revenue leakage and increase customer satisfaction, by cutting time-to-market for new service plans and accurately charging and billing customers for service use. VP: What are the biggest, most challenging implications for OSS/BSS?

Then bundles came in and evolved into OTT services and suddenly, service agility becomes essential. Consumers are consuming very different things – they might be viewed as data but they are really purchasing experiences not data. The data itself is not the service, it’s an enabler of the service. The challenge therefore is to make sure the customer experience remains very solid across any touchpoint. Data needs to be accessed by both the CSP and the customer to create a foundation so both get the right experience. The catalysts for the networked society – universal mobility, cloud computing and broadband – require new emphasis on customer experience, new levels of operating efficiency, and new business models. We believe that OSS/BSS has an increasing role to play in enabling new business models either through the ability to manage bundles of complex products that contain partner-supported components, or by enabling the provision of cloud-based services that combine network, IT and service quality considerations. OSS/BSS must deliver not only efficiency within processes, but economies of scale across the planning, building and operation of multi-technology, multi-vendor networks and services. VP: How is Ericsson addressing these challenges? PB: Our vision is to provide process-oriented OSS/BSS suites and an integrated operations and real-time platform based on a modern convergent architecture that is open, modular and cloud-enabled to support new value chains. In that vision, we are trying to encapsulate the end-to-end experience where the end user is the ultimate decision maker. The end user should be able to open, run and execute based on their individual needs and that means the OSS/BSS needs to be an integrated platform so the value chains can be captured and created around specific services in what is a constantly moving environment. Our strategic focus is on service agility, service enablement, customer experience, cloud management, big data analytics and automation and optimisation. These are the ingredients CSPs need. Service agility describes an environment that allows CSPs to create, launch, deliver and manage services efficiently to allow for rapid development of new product offerings. This is quickly becoming table stakes but, to markedly grow revenue, they must expose this environment to an expanded ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and developers to provide a wide range of creative new product offers. Our response is to assemble a number of our OSS/BSS and service enablement products into a pre-packaged service agility solution that is accessible to CSP business partners with more revenue for all parties. Our vision in service enablement is to bridge the gap between a commoditised core business and a fast moving, innovative and disruptive marketplace with a proven software platform with out-of -the-box commercialised business solutions. This includes personalisation, capability wholesaling, and M2M advancements. To support the customer experience our vision is to offer a comprehensive portfolio of software offerings for analysing, preparing, delivering and measuring customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

PB: The whole way that OSS/BSS has been put together has been based on a workflow established in 1885 at the dawn of the industry. That workflow is charge per minute or per use and send

an invoice to the customer. When mobile emerged in the early 1990s, all that happened was the cable was cut, but the CSP acted in the same way.

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Our goal to aid CSPs’ cloud management offerings is to develop software solutions that allow them to offer cloud services with endto-end control of service quality. We will do this by merging the network with the IT domain and managing cloud services as either via pre-defined offerings or completely new offerings created from a catalogue of reusable components. In the connected devices market, our plan is to create new value propositions and business ecosystems with partners and other industries by turning machine data into valuable information for new applications and services including smart metering, smart grid, smart home and connected vehicles. By combining real-time network, service, usage, and device data with unstructured data, we will provide CSPs with actionable insights from big data and analytics that accelerate and optimise business. Finally, our vision is that what can be automated will be automated, and networks and processes should run at their best, automatically. VP: Why are CSPs choosing Ericsson? PB: There is no doubt that a fierce competition is going on and time -to-market drives all decision making. There is now no room for faulty or low performing software. Our customers trust us to provide business critical systems. It’s critical to choose a vendor who can be a strategic partner and has that experience. You do need to be a large scale business with a history of proven success. We can truly meet those needs. We walk both sides of the street in telecoms – Ericsson, with more than 100 years in the industry, is the only vendor that is also the world’s largest CSP servicing more than 2.5 billion subscriptions. When we talk of the challenges CSPs face and the ways to overcome them it is that experience that separates us.

www.ericsson.com

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M W C

Zuckerberg will explore the importance of extending the benefits of ubiquitous internet access to the unconnected world.

P R E V I E W

Zuckerberg will headline the first of the week’s Mobile World Live keynote sessions on Monday, 24 February at 18:00-18:45. In the session, Zuckerberg and technology journalist and writer David Kirkpatrick will explore the importance of extending the benefits of ubiquitous internet access to the unconnected world. In addition to the live audience in the Conference Village in Fira Gran Via, the Mobile World Live keynotes will be streamed live across the venue and to hundreds of thousands of viewers globally via the Mobile World Live portal. In addition to Zuckerberg, the GSMA has announced further chief executives participating in the Mobile World Congress conference programme, including: • Laetitia Gazel Anthoine, the chief executive of Connecthings • Ahmad Abdulkarim Julfar, the chief executive of Etisalat Group • Stephen Odell, the president of Europe, Middle East and Africa, at Ford Motor Company • Susan Siegel, the chief executive of GE Ventures and healthymagination • Chua Sock Koong, the group chief executive of SingTel For full information on the Mobile World Congress conference programme, visit www.mobileworldcongress.com/conference.

mPowered Industries Keynotes

The mPowered Industries keynotes, to be held at the Fira Montjuic in Hall M5, will feature executives including: • Ralph Rivera, the director of Future Media at the BBC • Nicola Mendelsohn, the vice president, EMEA, of Facebook • Surjit Chana, the chief marketing officer of IBM Europe • Dr. Oliver Harrison, the chief executive and cofounder of Ithaca Health • Vikas Chawla, the vice president of Mobile and Digital Guest Services at Marriott International • David Sear, the chief executive of Weve The cross-section of industries involved illustrates how CSPs are no longer trying to compete in adjacent industries but are instead looking to generate revenues by enabling mobile business cases.

NFC Experience Although near-field communications (NFC) has not taken off in the ways expected, it is far from a failed technology and Mobile World Congress will see an extension of the use of the technology at the show from last year. The 2014 Mobile World Congress NFC

This year Mobile World Congress introduces its mPowered Industries programme, which focuses on mobile’s role in key vertical industry sectors such as

health, marketing and advertising, media and travel, will kick off with keynote sessions on the afternoon of Monday 24 February. These sessions will showcase the mobile achievements of top brands from around the world and will explore how adjacent industries can use the power of mobile to improve the customer experience and grow their businesses.

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Experience has been expanded to provide an even greater range of mobile NFC services for attendees with NFC-enabled devices, such as venue access, catering and networking, as well as demonstrations of the latest NFC products and services, among others. This year, attendees with iPhones will be also be able to participate in NFC Experience activities using an NFC-enabled case provided by Mobile World Congress Supporting Partner Incipio. The GSMA is introducing interactive NFC Tap-n-Go Points to provide attendees quick and easy access to event information and other downloadable material. Attendees with NFC-enabled devices can go to one of the 61 NFC Tap-n-Go Points located across Fira Gran Via to easily download event news, schedules, documents, presentations, videos and other information. As part of the NFC Experience, the GSMA will be demonstrating a range of NFC-based Mobile Commerce solutions, highlighting applications in payment, retail, transport, mobile identity and access, among others. Partners demonstrating solutions with the GSMA include Aimia, Assa Abloy, BC Card, Chunghwa Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Escher Group, Gemalto, The Logic Group, Proxama, Telecom Italia, Telenor and Verifone.

The Connected City At Mobile World Congress, the next generation GSMA Connected City will showcase transformational mobile experiences. Visitors will be able to explore mobile

innovations in health, automotive, education, smart cities, digital commerce and other sectors.

“The potential of

Attendees will be able to navigate the streets of the city with their own device, guided by downloadable maps which lead them to interactive demonstrations, and cutting edge technology. Users will learn how mobile is delivering a richer experience by creating more value and greater efficiency with intelligent wireless connections. CSPs such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, GSMA, KT, Vodafone and their partners, will demonstrate how connected solutions will become part of everyday life and how they are powering economic growth and new business opportunities. The Connected City is at Fira Gran Via, Hall 3, Stand 3A11 and 3A31 and is open throughout the show.

connectivity to the

mobile to provide unconnected and form the foundation of the platform for users’ digital lives is as exciting as ever”

The App Planet App Planet part of the Congress will explore who is creating the next big thing and enable developers to connect with peers and content specific conference sessions for the developer community. The App Planet includes: • App Developer Conferences (ADCs) This range of free conference sessions are aimed at designers of software for devices that want building relationships to technology platforms, or gain knowledge on topics from operating systems and APIs, to app stores and monetization. The conferences will be held in Hall 8.0 Theatre District. • App Planet Exhibition Showcasing over 200 app-focused exhibitors in the areas of apps, gadgets, devices and technology in the mobile ecosystem, the App Planet Exhibition is located in Hall 8.1. • App Networking There are a series of networking opportunities in App Planet. The App Lounge in Hall 8.1 will provide attendees a location to connect to Wi-Fi, hold meetings with new customers, pick up a publication provided by our media partners, or regroup with peers to plan what is next to explore. Last year’s event welcomed more than 72,000 attendees from 200 countries to the Congress’s new venue at the Fira Gran Via. Fears of transport issues to the new venue proved baseless and the general consensus was that the new venue provided more space and improved facilities and catering. Although the venue remains the same, this year’s event will cover new ground as the mobile industry continues to its transformation to the role of being the enabler of the Internet of Things. With LTE roll-out advancing across the world, the potential of mobile to provide connectivity to the unconnected and form the foundation of the platform for users’ digital lives is as exciting as ever. The collaborative attitude the industry appears to be promoting now indicates that CSPs may even be able to make money from this.

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Why 2014 has to be the year of intelligent data Communications service providers (CSPs) are faced with declining revenues from users that are demanding more and more capacity. CSPs therefore need to change the business model and find news ways of generating revenue. Antti Koskela says utilising their data intelligently could be an answer

t’s somewhat ironic that at a time when the number of mobile users around the world will reach 1.75 billion according to eMarketer research, the telecoms industry is facing steep declines in revenue. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Only a few emerging markets like China will see above-average growth. Overall, Ovum predicts that CSP revenues will grow just 2% per year through to 2018. As traditional sources of revenue such as roaming charges and SMS have been lost to regulation or over-the-top (OTT) competition, the top priorities for CSPs this year should be extracting monetary value from their data asset and the deployment of new technology that allows for rapid and efficient deployment of innovative services, creating new business opportunities. CSPs know that big data is important in making this happen. But to make use of big data, CSPs first have to focus on creating intelligent data insights.

The author, Antti Koskela, is CTO of Comptel

Become effortlessly efficient Right now, the name of the game is efficiency. CTOs know that better than anyone, because it has been their jobs to bring networks into the future. This future for many CSPs has been recognised as being all-IP and through adoption of cloud technologies. Virtualised environments can deliver big benefits including opex and capex efficiency and time-tomarket advantage; they can also have a profound impact in disaster recovery, redundancy reduction, mobility and in agile project models. That’s because, when scaled across the organisation, going virtual can touch every part of the business. Innovative CSPs are already experiencing some of these benefits by using cloud-based platforms and applications such as CRM from salesforce.com. Working within the cloud promotes collaboration, social integration, analytical insight and mobility, effectively creating a new generation of operating principles.

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Unlocking the data within Unfortunately all of this potential efficiency, innovation and agility remain stunted in many cases. That’s apparent even from the way CSPs implement OSS/BSS stacks. Typically, CSPs will differentiate between enterprise and the mass market subscriber services, effectively cutting systems into two, if not more. So, even as CSPs rely on OSS and BSS to streamline operational processes, the responsibilities for each stack often fall to different teams, and the data set stays locked within that department. Without enrichment with information from other departments or with analytical insight, its value can remain limited to the silo where it was conceived. By consolidating siloed OSS/BSS systems and analysing network usage in real-time, CSPs can make data intelligent – where it becomes an active, streaming source of business insights that can be transformed into new revenue opportunities. Instead of requiring painstaking and manual analysis, contextual intelligence driven by predictive analytics can help ensure that CSPs’ data benefits the business. For instance, imagine combining equipment failure notifications with predictive analytics to establish trends, and proactively identify propensity for future failures. Then imagine associating those predictions with associated revenue impacts and you have some powerful insights to work from. Analytics only scratches the surface of what’s possible with consolidated OSS/BSS systems and virtualised environments. And what’s possible with intelligent data.

SDN: The effect of internal, intelligent data Intelligent data isn’t just valuable for revenue growth. Combining intelligent data with the emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) provides an opportunity of service innovation and agility previously unthinkable. Virtualising Layer 3 services challenges all of the existing architectures, supplier hierarchies and associated market dominances, from the network equipment providers (NEPs) through to the OSS/BSS vendors. SDN also levels the playing field for new

This marks a difference from the past. In the early days of flow-through provisioning for example, the business case for automating enterprise services endto-end was difficult to justify. The number of service instances versus the level of complexity often caused CSPs to conclude the only viable solution was to rely

on robust manual business processes. All-IP networks, virtualisation and cloud-based applications are finally making end-to-end automation a reality.

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entrants in software network applications and associated management platforms.

they’ve wanted above all: personalised engagement and a good customer experience.

This flatter landscape could serve as the foundation for a new business model – for CSPs, NEPs and OSS/BSS vendors alike. There have been false dawns in the past, specifically with IMS/SDP, but the signals this time seem a good deal more promising. With SDN, the ideal network is an all-IP layer 2 network that offers insertion points for software that manages service applications. Typical uses for this software can include QoS, peer-to-peer functions, charging, location enrichment, content caching, security and network traffic optimisation. The number of insertion points could become significant, and a key to Network Function Virtualisation (NFV)/SDN becoming real is the ability to scale automation and execution of the management processes from this software.

Context-aware communications

Pairing these functions with intelligent data can drastically increase efficiency and turn traditional business models on their head. More efficient operations and tools will lead to a streamlined approach to infrastructure management, data security and faster time-to-market for new products. Sleeker CSPs will lead to more powerful, dynamic products and services that will change the market and allow CSPs to focus on giving consumers the one thing that

CSPs already have the data necessary for this kind of success, but most isn’t intelligent. Before a business can fully exploit the benefits of big data, organisational silos need to be flattened, and OSS/BSS need to be consolidated. When a solution is implemented that can organise user data in real-time, data will become intelligent and teams can work together toward the common goal of enhancing customer experience and moving business forward.

In the mobile world, context is critical to personalisation. Today, aside from mass messages aimed at upselling to customers or warning them about data limits, most CSPs only make rare ventures into sending contextual messages to customer segments. But companies can no longer assume that users are in one specific location – they could be using their devices in line at the grocery store, on a couch, at a concert or during lunch. Data without intelligence assumes users are still doing the same thing they were doing an hour ago. Intelligent data can reveal usage habits in real-time, offering unprecedented opportunities for personalisation and other forms of customer engagement.

Innovative CSPs are already experiencing some of these benefits by using cloud-based platforms and applications such as CRM from salesforce.com

I N T E R V I E W

Omni-channel customer engagement provides a big opportunity for data insights s the service arena continues to diversify touching multiple systems across multiple channels, CSPs are challenged to converge all the disparate sources of data into meaningful insights. Here, Peter Conquest, the business development director at hybris, explains why CSPs need an omni-channel approach in order to extract value from all these sources of data and deliver a better, more cohesive experience to customers

Peter Conquest: The complexity of converging data from multiple sources should not be underestimated

VanillaPlus: What are the greatest challenges CSPs face in managing data as service usage proliferates across systems, platforms and devices?

sources. That could be composed of location data, device data, social preferences, billing information and inputs from policy control and network, for example.

Peter Conquest: Communication service providers (CSPs) are certainly challenged to keep on top of data in real-time due to the explosion in internet services and the adaption of internet enabled devices. This has given rise to complex challenges where customers adopt new touch points and expect a cohesive experience from the beginning to the end of their purchase journey. In addition cloud services are growing rapidly creating more challenges and opportunities as SMBs and large corporate enterprises adopt these services.

The real value is in how to merge all that data from all those sources into useful information about the customer to enable upsell and cross-sell opportunities. The capability becomes a merchandising and customer service tool that is reliant on continuously available streams of data.

Large volumes of content are coming in via multiple sources and somehow they have got to be pieced together. For example, a user may begin an interaction with a CSP on a smartphone or tablet that may then cross into a session of web-self care, culminating in a visit to a high street store to view or purchase a product. All manner of data come into this service chain but they all originate in different systems â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or channels â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and that is where the challenge really lies.

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PC: The user is more empowered with access to internet-enabled services, which may seem obvious, but creates a range of new behaviour for CSPs to fit their businesses around. Customers understand brands, not channels, although they interact across multiple channels in the traditional telco sense. Therefore CSPs need to act in a way that is consistent to customers and delivers the brand experience they desire regardless of channel. Social media, for example, is one channel that generates billions of interactions and CSPs need to be able to converge their data with data generated within that channel. CSPs bundle products and services and they receive large volumes of data from different sources and need a mechanism to converge that and extract value from it. At the same time, customers expect a cohesive experience if theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in a store, on a mobile or

CSPs need to have a comprehensive view of what the customer has across the portfolio of services they use and the data collected in the systems that support those services. They then have to manipulate those bundles and product offerings with great agility based on a raft of information coming in from the different

VP: How have user expectations changed and what pressure does that put on CSPs?

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speaking to a call centre agent. That puts the CSP under pressure because their data is very siloed and sits in many different databases for each channel. The complexity of bringing all of this together should not be underestimated. Right now, there’s no easy way to fully address this fragmented complexity but, as consistent data is presented across all touch points, CSPs will be able to handle this better and fulfil in-store as well as on the device or in the call centre. VP: What does omni-channel data mean to CSPs? What value can they extract and deliver to offset the costs involved in enabling this? PC: Omni-channel means converging data from all channels to create the cohesive environment required to support customers’ demands. The technology has to be extendable to meet these demands. The challenge for CSPs is that they have to handle big data as well as the customer pressures involved in enabling cloud services and devices from anywhere in real-time. With touch points such as tracking of mobile applications, CSPs can intelligently personalise information and can learn much more about users’ behaviour and preferences. They can track exactly what has happened to a particular user. This could be from chat and community data such as social feeds or it could be

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from master data such as logistics, CRM and billing. This comprehensive data can then be used to create attractive, personalised propositions for new revenue generation. By combining analytical tools with personalisation rules, the CSP will be able to gather valuable customer insight. The value of that knowledge, and the ability to apply it across all the channels that a customer engages with, will provide competitive advantage.

Omni-channel data simply is the means of converging data from all channels to create the cohesive environment required to support customers’ demands

VP: Is a new platform needed to enable the concept of omni-channel data? What does hybris provide? PC: We have massive amounts of data that has to be drawn from the databases. That information just can’t be handled in a standard database so it has to be managed in a third party database but that means connections are needed to properly integrate it. We are integrated with HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) as well using NoSQL storage support from MongoDb, Cassandra and others The reason why we think we’re in a good position is that we have the experience of big data and our product is uniquely a purpose-built fit for the CSP market, both for B2C and B2B offerings. We already handle the complexities of bundling and subscription management, order management, B2B functionality and have enabled hybris to work in a cloud environment. So, the hybris solution is not about starting from zero – the foundations are in place which we are now building on.

www.hybris.com

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A N A LY S I S

Customer experience management – CSPs turn to value-based delivery and service support Technology advances and service innovation will drive changes in how consumers use telecoms products and services. The monetisation of these services requires communications service providers (CSPs) to provide more flexible offers and manage each interaction in the customer lifecycle to optimise the customer experience. CSPs in developed and emerging markets must focus on extending the customer lifecycle and creating a positive experience in order to differentiate themselves from other CSPs that are focused on price, device offerings and network coverage

The author, Patrick Kelly, is research director at Analysys Mason

manage their operational activities against the perceptions of how well they are doing according to their customers?

igure 1 represents the customer lifecycle and illustrates why CSPs need to pay more attention to their processes and measure the interactions at each stage of the customer lifecycle to keep customers longer and sell more products and services with the overall goal of improving profitability. Our research shows that in the first year after acquiring a customer, a CSP spends between 12% and 20% of revenue in acquisition costs, which include marketing, selling, onboarding and equipment subsidies. With such high costs in the first year, how do CSPs measure and

CSPs can improve customer retention and drive revenue growth if they focus on three critical areas of their business. • Simplifying the pricing, packaging and purchasing process. Understanding the usage and consumer behaviour patterns to promote relevant offers that customers value. • Streamlining the on-boarding process in order to avoid customer frustration and high support costs. • Understanding what drives customer requests. This reduces contact care cost and raises net promoter scores (NPS) for customers who prefer self-care.

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The importance of extending the customer lifecycle

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Value-based service differentiation in the customer experience

Figure 1: The customer lifecycle and its impact on profitability [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

After getting the basics right, CSPs should aim to ensure a consistent customer experience across all customer touch points. Figure 2 looks at each phase in the customer lifecycle and contact points between the customer and CSP employees. This contact could be either online or a live interaction. We have identified some areas based on our consulting and research work with CSPs to highlight where most of the value-based service differentiation can be achieved to raise NPS and customer satisfaction. Figure 2 illustrates some data collected from a CSP that we consulted with on a project to improve customer loyalty and operational processes. It segments the customer base according to historical spending and internal measurements collected by the CSP on interactions with the customer. The data reveals that 50% of this CSPsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; customer interactions occur in the billing phase. The analysis concluded that a large number of enquiries resulted from customers failing to understand how services were billed. This drives up support cost and creates frustration with the customer. The obvious conclusion is to redesign the bill and use other tools such as customised video billing, which we have covered in our research into customer experience management.

Figure 2: Value-based service differentiation in the customer experience [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

Requests for technical support also generate high levels of customer contact activity. Figure 2 reveals that almost one third of customer contact occurs in this area. It is in this phase that the CSP may want to focus on only the top 6% of its customer base to provide exceptional support. This model is used in other industries such as airlines, but outside the business market segment, most CSPs have not actively developed any meaningful strategies to date. In many developed markets, high-value postpaid subscribers do not receive any special perks until they contemplate leaving at the end of their contract.

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