Primary research conducted by Telecom Advisory Services and commissioned by Amdocs has found that adopting a best-of-suite approach to business support and operations support systems architectures is key to lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) and meeting the key business challenges of service providers.

Telecom Advisory Services is a management-consulting firm specializing in carrier strategies. It has staff in the United States, Europe and Latin America. The firm resurrects the argument that a best-of-suite approach provides a degree of integration across multiple applications provided by a single vendor, a benefit in its eyes to a best-of-breed approach that offers a combination of independent applications from different vendors and requires more integration work.

The firm said that the market is no longer defined by a few providers selling stable products to a predictable customer base through well-established channels. This puts pressure on reducing time-to-market and costs while supporting new multimedia and content-based services. Telecom Advisory Services confirmed trends seen in the industry recently where groups like the TeleManagement Forum have taken steps to integrate the functions of OSS and BSS.

Raul Katz, president of Telecom Advisory Services, said the prevalence of disconnected BSS/OSS silos has been the main culprit preventing service providers from streamlining their operations and lowering their TCO. “Our study of leading Tier 1 service providers presents quantitative proof that a best-of-suite approach offers the most effective and cost-saving strategy versus best-of-breed,” he said in a statement.

The firm showed that in at least one instance, a best-of-suite architecture would offer the following cost savings over a best-of-breed approach: a 20% reduction in acquisition and implementation costs, a 43% savings in operating costs and a 39% reduction in the costs associated with maintaining the service provider’s IT architecture.

Katz said service providers are spending on average 6.5% of their revenues on IT. Sixty percent of that is spent just to maintain the operating status quo. Other examples and case studies are available in a white paper outlining the study’s hypotheses, findings, analysis and conclusions.

Other benefits to a best-of-suite approach identified in the study include: support for common business processes, shared data repositories across applications and the ability to collect data at the business level to improve operations and customer-supporting processes.

However, Katz said, not all best-of-suite architectures are created equal. He said service providers must evaluate key requirements such as service provider-specific functionality; proven integration within the suite, a clearly defined roadmap and end-to-end business process management. “By taking these factors into consideration, service providers can select a best-of-suite solution that will not only lower their TCO as they transform their business and the underlying architecture, but also achieve this with minimal business risk,” he said.

Amdocs and other large software vendors such as Oracle and HP have been constructing their best-of-suite architectures through acquisition and internal development over the past year and have joined Telcordia as the industries largest suite providers with professional services attached.

Amdocs has also been focused on growing its consultancy business around OSS/BSS and other business processes. You can here David Groom, vice president of Amdocs Consulting, discuss both this research and the companies consultant practice in this Telephony podcast.