A friend of mine in the telecom publishing business asked me recently what I think about SDP/BSS integration. That reminded me also that I have not written anything on this blog for a long while ... So good opportunity to put some thoughts in ink...
Integration ... a question that comes up each time we forgot to look at the bigger picture when building something - be it because we want to protect a turf or just because we could not see further.
The silo pattern of doing business is reflected all over telecom organizations: network services and business support alike. Take the example of doing business with 3-rd parties such as banks, utilities, content providers, etc. the partnership management and subsequently supporting systems such as settlement, SLA management, service access points are separated, operators ending up operating 5-10 B2B solutions. Similarly, in the quest for ringing in immediate revenue, many services have been built in silos creating at operations level a maze of integration points and access portals, and myriads of brittle lifecycle management processes.
Thinking from the perspective of many small 3-rd party Service Providers, the Time To Market, be the first to offer some new experience to the end consumer is crucial for the business. Competition in consumer space is fierce. So which consumer oriented business, pressured to gain quickly market share, has the patience and the power to work through the operational maze of a telecom operator to get to that end consumer? This is the OTT story in a nutshell. It is powered by the smart devices, by the rapid innovation in software and by the "risk takers". Despite the “dump pipe” callings it is also a good story for the operators because it finally realizes the promise of revenue from broadband investment, at much lower risk than each of the OTT players undertake in taking their services to end consumers. “Mobile Internet” Access and “High Speed Internet” Access which are successfully sold today by all major operators around the world will grow into a 1T$ business by 2015, some Internet sources say. It is the “golden pipe” strategy - realized.
With this temporary relief, operator’s attention must focus on bringing in an additional 1-2T$ in the next maybe 5 years to replace current (already decreasing) revenue from core business. There is a potential disruption looming as everything migrates to e2e IP. The price of voice will sooner or later be aligned with Skype or Google Voice and even the whole service may be replaced by new forms of communications entertained today by social networks such as Facebook or QQ/Tencent.
This need to stay relevant, which amounts to 1-2T$, is the real driver for business transformation which somewhere, sometimes will unify SDPs and BOSS. The delays we see in taking serious actions are motivated by the lack of clarity as to which strategy to embrace. For example, opening up the network to 3-rd party developers and AppStores are a good reality check on how difficult it is today to integrate a developer mind and a consumer mind through an operator mind. Revenue sharing with millions of partners, “Freemium” business models based on “in Apps” charging and multiple types of payments are costlier to realize in the telecom domain than in Internet domain; some of the enablers sit on the Service Delivery Platform side, some on the BSS side, some do not exist yet. Enough to fear this is a risky strategy.
But how about a platform for concurrent business development in many areas: service, content and application innovation, cloud/IT services, cross-industries and telco assets “mixed in”. A business models enablement platform where core assets and relationships are both exposed in ways that allow any organization (operator or 3-rd party) to create new business. A platform where there is enough flexibility and on the technical side and on the relationships management side that it becomes easy to experiment with new services or build up upon the existing services and partners. Fit into the "right for business/good value for customer" place in many value chains. This is the true meaning of the multi-sided business platform. It may be a collusion of SDP and NGBSS concepts into this kind of platform or whatever it takes to make it easily shaped by requirements from each new business model and not vice-versa (what happens today when the platform shapes the business). Flexible architecture and governance models adaptative to the context (who is upstream, who is downstream, how to create economic value in-between?) not just boxes with APIs that nobody knows what to do with. This is how I see all these platforms integrated.
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