Level 3, Sprint, Embarq and AT&T move back-office plans forward

OSS "transformation" projects are beginning to move off the drawing board and into production, with executives behind those efforts warning colleagues they'll take longer than expected, fail without employee and exec-level buy-in and put greater pressure on IT to contribute to top-line growth, according to service providers at the B/OSS World Show in Chicago.

Wholesaler Level 3 completed the production turn-up of its Project Unity OSS platform this quarter. By the end of the year, the new systems -- which include systems from Siebel (for CRM), Savvion (for BPM), Tibco (for SOA integration and Telcordia (for inventory management) -- will support half the company's order volume and two-thirds of its revenue, Level 3 CIO Kevin Hart said in an interview.

Those systems are being counted on to help Level 3 meet its financial goals, including a target of cash flow break even by the year's end. "Our processes have been greatly simplified internally and now the focus is on workforce training and enablement to help us with even faster [service] turn-ups of higher margin products," he said.

Sprint/Nextel embarked on an OSS transformation for its IP/wireline business about a year and a half ago. Today, it is relying on those same underlying systems to support its wireless and WIMAX (Xohm) network expansions, said Scott Jenkins, manager of application development-IT Network Systems for the operator.

"The same network resource management application suite from a year and a half ago is now supporting Xohm," Jenkins said. At the same time, Sprint must model and support different business processes in its WiMAX business -- processes are not one-size-fits all, he said. "You've got to look at what business you want to be in and how to sustain that business. That's why drives your system strategy and transformation."

Embarq, meanwhile, is about one year into a three-year OSS transformation project, Vercie Lark, the carrier’s president of IT told Telephony. Four core projects are on Lark’s plate these days: a back office-wide transition to SOA, now complete; a new business intelligence system deployment, just getting underway; an implementation of a new CRM system, slated for the second half of the year; and deployment of a new service delivery platform, now in the evaluation stage.

All four projects are focused on helping Embarq improve customer insight, speed time-to-market for new services and build an open partner ecosystem, said IT head Lark. And all of these projects are moving forward as Embarq finalizes the retirement of systems left over from its spin-off from Sprint. While IT consolidation due to acquisition is a common chore for many telco CIOs, “it’s even more complicated to decouple systems than to consolidate them,” Lark said, noting that strong IT governance and adherence to a strict kill/grow/cap strategy has helped Embarq transform its back-office while shedding its pasts.

An open question is the degree to which system and workforce transformation needs to be aligned. On panels, vendors like IBM and Oracle proposed that at times it was appropriate for the systems piece to get a bit ahead. “If you have your system layer and business process layer reengineered, you can let the organization structure catch up,” said Robert Pucci, BSS/OSS global solutions technical lead for IBM.

The future-proof way to build such systems is to follow increasingly mature SOA standards as well as industry standards like the TeleManagement Forum eTom, said Pucci, with an ultimate goal of creating a service abstraction layer that can serve existing and new services equally well.

Oracle advises customers to “put in a cleaner stack for next-generation services with a strong orchestration layer so [the network and supporting systems] don’t know if the services are new or legacy,” said Leonard Sheahan, senior director of product marketing for Oracle.

One of the greatest challenges for telecom service providers is that they must work and compete on three levels -- managing the network, managing customers and incubating services -- while Web-based competitors -- leveraging the Internet and dealing usually with anonymous customers -- typically focus only on delivering new services, Sheahan said.

That fact could lead savvy service providers – and Sheahan said he is already seeing this in some providers around the world -- to focus on brand-building and customer experience management while outsourcing network management and new service creation and hosting to others, including opening up to third-party developers, Sheahan said.

In the area of new service creation, telco IT teams are strongly focused on implementing new service delivery platforms (SDPs), service creation and exposure platforms and service delivery frameworks (SDFs), which represent the larger integration of a way not only to build services but also to integrate them into the BSS/OSS for overall service management, billing and lifecycle support, said Johanne Mayer, director-communication OSS for Alcatel-Lucent.

“One of the biggest things we’re focused on is the architecture of participation and Web 2.0,” said Rich Erickson, senior architect at AT&T Labs. Today on the Web, “services are generally free and there’s not a lot of support for complex ordering, billing and service assurance, Erickson said. “We want to introduce a model where it becomes feasible to deliver BSS/OSS-style functionality in a Web 2.0 environment.”