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The OSS/BSS divide is no longer sustainable, if it ever was — service assurance mediation confirms that.
In the traditional view of the service provider’s world, operational and business support systems have been seated on opposite sides of a common divide; the customer. One set of IT solutions addresses the operational and network-centric (service activation, management and maintenance) side of the industry and the other faces the subscriber (billing, customer relationship management, etc.). It seems ironic that the industry has grown up this way given the impact that each set of functions has on the other but that, perhaps, is the result of a more network-centric world than exists today. Think about it; customer experience systems decoupled from network performance solutions — does that make sense?
The challenge for operators is to locate, in IT terms, a bridge that conjoins views of the two worlds, and then renders each impactful in terms of how the end customer can benefit. And to be clear, this is a challenge.
Within their BSS stack, operators already have a logical point at which to achieve this; the mediation layer. Theoretically, mediation provides a network-to-IT integration platform that should be capable of the acquisition and high-volume processing of data from a large number of disparate (in terms of data shapes and formats) sources (not just business-related) simultaneously. It should be able to correlate as well as isolate and preserve key data from all network segments to create actionable information, often related to KPI measurement and adapted to the target applications. Modern mediation applications should be able to manage data type diversity on both down-stream and up-stream interfaces in real-time and offline modes on one, convergent platform.
In addition to the sheer volume of records involved, LTE network design is now introducing a flatter topology with more intelligence held in base stations. As a result, the number of points from which to collect quality records is increased.
In short, the mediation platform should provide the central point from which the issue of the service assurance function can be confidently addressed. This encompasses a number of use cases such as:
- Traffic analysis and performance reporting.
- Call trace to customer experience management.
- Normalized data in multi-play networks.
- Notifications to churn management based on e.g. deviation in consumption patterns and key performance indicators.
- Data exposure to CRM, enabling improved customer interaction.
A closer examination of a particularly relevant use case: using real-time LTE call trace data in a customer experience management context underlines this point. In competitive markets, quality of the service can provide a compelling advantage, meaning subscriber-centric monitoring is particularly important. It can increase perceived quality of service and thereby reduce churn. To achieve this, call trace data must be collected from multiple sources in the radio, core and IMS planes and then merged and enriched.
While these are complex challenges, mediation should be uniquely placed to address them. It is inherently designed to acquire and process extreme volumes of data records from an almost infinite number of sources. It has the ability to correlate data from different network segments in real-time. Mediation applications also have the ability to expose and present data in a way that quickly enables complex queries and drill-down analysis. This goes beyond simple distribution toward holding data (such as that related to KPIs) and exposing it via APIs for other systems to query.
Deployed in this way, mediation can open up new possibilities for the service provider to make the best use of its resources and achieve greater performance, while at the same time satisfying customer needs. It can enable the CSP to:
- Better leverage existing hardware.
- Remove hardware bottlenecks and lower total cost of ownership.
- Simplify operations when scaling architectures through automatic data distribution.
- Optimize data streams.
- Gain protection from disruptive changes in the network.
- Ensure the continuous quality of services.
- Hide the complexity of the underlying network.
- Allow new technologies and services to be added with only configuration.
- Minimize revenue loss.
The benefits to the CSP who deploys what might be termed “service assurance mediation” are significant. Apart from the direct and positive impact on end customers, a common data acquisition and processing layer reduces costs and complexity. It also simplifies data integration and provides advanced pre-processing capabilities, offloading NMS and analytics systems while increasing granularity of information. This also goes beyond increasing data granularity alone, ensuring that the exposed data is actionable, meaning (with cleaner data on hand) that the CSP can immediately identify value and thus seek to monetize rather than simply store its data, as has often been the case in the past.
It could be argued that the BSS/OSS divide has always been “false” in so far as mediation has had the potential to bridge the gap and has in any case sat on the periphery of the network and business worlds. But the challenging new use cases that network evolution creates are driving the emergence of a new way of utilizing the mediation platform. As a result, the boundaries of the OSS and BSS functions are becoming blurred. For the telco, this represents real progress.
Lars Månsson is Sr. Director of Product Management & Strategy at DigitalRoute. DigitalRoute is an ISV delivering market leading mediation and data integration solutions.
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