What's Driving OSS/BSS Growth?

It's always hard to pin down the value of the OSS/BSS market, because no two organizations seem to use the same criteria to define the market. But on one thing there is agreement: The market is growing.

But what's driving that growth? One suggestion is that OSS and BSS vendors will benefit in the coming few years from the growing willingness of network operators to outsource some, if not maybe all, of their back-office functions. That trend is analyzed in Outsourcing Positioned to Drive OSS/BSS Growth, an article on our sister site, Service Provider IT Report.

Another view is that the transition to next-generation networks, and the associated need for new management and support systems, will be enough to generate growth. This industry report, for example, suggests that the OSS/BSS market will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.72% in the 2013-2018 period to reach US$54.36 billion.

One company, Transparency Market Research, reckons that growing demand for convergent billing systems will be a major factor in the market's growth. It predicts that the sector will experience a 16.2% CAGR from 2012 to 2018 to reach $48.54 billion.

What's less clear, though, is which companies will benefit from any such growth. It seems very likely that Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) vendors such as Amdocs Inc., AsiaInfo-Linkage Inc., Comverse Inc., CSG Systems International Inc., Ericsson AB, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., NetCracker Technology Corp., Oracle Corp., and Redknee Inc. will command a healthy chunk of the market, but what about the other 400 or so companies trying to make a living in this sector?

Let's hope the recent travails of Volubill , which found itself under too much pressure from the major vendors to survive as an independent company, are not going to become commonplace: This sector needs diversity and innovation. (See CSG Buys Volubill Assets.)

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading