As BSS/OSS blend, ‘mass personalization’ is key, Ericsson says
NICE, France–Customer experience is a function of rapid, personalized service offerings, Ove Anebygd, VP of OSS/BSS for Ericsson told members of the media during a session at TM Forum Live.
Digital transformation, he said, is a popular buzzword in the telecom industry right now, but he stressed that digitalization–“the end game”–is more important. “Instead of just focusing on the transformation as a process, focus on the end game, which is digitalization.”
“We think there is a new reality that we stand in front of,” he said. “It’s actually what we would say is software is now key to these digitalized business processes. Human beings not any longer can process this information fast enough. It has to be software. We have to replace all these support systems with one software stack. What is important when you replace all these systems that were built with good reason but is no longer a good solution. This new stack of OSS/BSS is run in real time and it has to be processes that depends on software that can manage that amount of data.”
Speaking to IoT and 5G, he hit on network slicing, which is how Ericsson describes “where different industries will have their network inside the network. That makes the software, again, controlling those slices and orchestrating the services that will be transported on those slices.”
That means vehicular-specific network services, for instance, will be deployed in a optimized bit of spectrum and be supported by a fully programmable data pipe. Expanded to encompass all of the IoT, any object could connect to any cloud in the most efficient way possible.
From a product angle, Jan Haguland, VP, Head of Product Area Network Analytics and Control, Business Unit Cloud and IP, highlighted the Ericsson Network Manager, which Swisscom brought live on a portion of its LTE network in December.
“Automation and 5G is what the Ericsson Network manager will do,” he said. “This is live now. It’s going to be a big rollout initiative,” and will help foster the DevOps relationship that communications service providers are adopting.
Anebygd said the push to software will benefit Ericsson’s business “in a very positive way. We do see there are new realities. Software will be key to run business processes in an efficient [way] and real time. The new ecosystem where we see the offering not covering only the telco digitalization but also the rest of the industry.”
