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Please contact:
Jeff Claudino
Director of Sales, Insider Research Services
619-229-9940
or via email at:
claudino@lightreading.com |
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| Order to Cash: How SOA Can Break Down Telco OSS Silos |
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In today's Web-driven world, customers expect service delivery on demand, customized to their requirements, and with a choice of payment options. Operators want to realize revenue from services faster by bringing new services to market more quickly and by shortening the time from customer order to revenue collection. Order-to-cash is the process associated with delivering a product to a customer from the point of order to the collection of payment.
Operators are targeting the order-to-cash process as ripe for transformation and they want to streamline and automate their existing processes. These systems may live in functional silos with only manual links between them, and they were typically acquired from different OSS/BSS vendors, so they are unlikely to share a common view of products or customers, two key participants in the order-to-cash process. Joining up functional silos and establishing a common, seamless process across them is pushing the requirement for the consolidation and common management of product and customer information.
The need to support order-to-cash in a more flexible and standardized way across the business is leading the most advanced operators to adopt SOA concepts and technologies. Operators that have adopted an SOA approach are relatively early on in the process: Even those that have had programs underway for three or four years have yet to produce compelling metrics that demonstrate the value of an SOA-based order-to-cash process.
In the current economic climate, moves to standardize and rationalize the order-to-cash process may be put on hold as operators go for "quick fixes." They should be careful that these do not play into the hands of vendors, creating more OSS/BSS silos that may make them less agile in the future. Convergent, real-time billing is an area that is proving highly resistant to an SOA approach and operators should consider carefully the future impact of adopting a tightly-coupled convergent billing suite.
Order to Cash: How SOA Can Break Down Telco OSS Silos analyzes the scope of the order-to-cash process and how the need to sell a next generation of products is driving demand for a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based operation support system/business support system (OSS/BSS) architecture. The report looks at process and system areas that are challenging telco process architects as they try to consolidate and manage product data centrally and create a future-proof process that spans fulfillment and billing domains. This report also analyzes how vendors are responding to operator order-to-cash challenges.
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| Sample research data from the report is shown in the excerpts below: |
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 Table of Contents (ssi0309toc.pdf) |
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| The repackaging of OSS/BSS applications as modular, Web services-enabled functions that can work easily with other vendors will enable operators to take a "best-of-suite" approach toward supporting order-to-cash, instead of choosing between a best-of-breed plus integration or an entire product suite approach. The "SOA-ification" of the OSS/BSS landscape points to a time when an operator can construct such systems to order by putting together best-of-breed Web services functions from multiple vendors. |
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| Although best-of-breed OSS/BSS vendors have argued that no operator will bet all its business on a single vendor, the barriers to the single vendor are beginning to break down – provided that vendor offers the right set of Web services-enabled function, and provided the individual functions are replaceable, if necessary, with a Web services product from another vendor. |
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| [click on the image above for the full excerpt] |
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 Companies profiled in this report include: Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU); Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX); Comptel Corp.; Comverse Inc., a subsidiary of Comverse Technology Inc. (Pink Sheets: CMTV); Convergys Corp. (NYSE: CVG); Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC); Highdeal SA; IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM); NetCracker Technology Corp., a subsidiary of NEC Corp. (Pink Sheets: NIPNF); Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture of Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Siemens AG (NYSE: SI; Frankfurt: SIE); Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL); Telcordia Technologies Inc.; Tribold Ltd.; and Volubill SA. |
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| Total pages: 33 |
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| To view reports you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader. If you do not have it, it can be obtained for free at the Adobe web site. |
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