Blogs

Communications service providers (CSPs) know that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent a significant market for both basic communications services and a range of additional, value-added services, such as security, unified communications, hosting, ecommerce, and online applications.

Sometimes technological innovation of the kind that transcends sectoral boundaries is the result of chance, and sometimes it is the result of deliberate planning – an intentional ‘lift, drop and port’ exercise where an entrenched way of doing things in one sector is shown to be inefficient by comparison with an analogous situation in another sector.

Billing system vendors used to build their own database systems, and network management system vendors used to create their own reporting tools. The reasons for doing this disappeared. Enterprise database technology got good enough to do the job at lower prices, and the reporting capabilities from specialist tools began to overtake those of NMSs. Consequently the OSS/BSS community stopped their own development and started building in commodity IT infrastructure and applications sourced from others.

Listening to Amdocs explain the rationale for the changes that it had made in its CES 9 integrated software suite for telecoms operators and service providers, launched on 5 February, I was struck by how the relatively inward-looking world of telecoms IT and network operations is being turned inside out, and how vendors of OSS and BSS are helping.

Most comment on the acquisition of Virgin Media by Liberty Global has focused on the obvious: “It will create the world’s biggest cable operator.” “Richard Branson will get a nice lump sum.” “Malone and Murdoch can slug it out in a new market.” “To be successful Liberty will have to sell more bundles and upsell more TV and broadband.”  Ho hum…