BMUS/OSS Roundtable

Historically, the drive toward IP and convergence has followed the desire to cut costs and to expand the range of services offered. Some services, like Internet access, can only be effectively delivered using IP. Other services, however, including data and voice communications have traditionally been delivered through a variety of transport and access technologies - most of which are less cost effective and flexible than an IP network. The trend today is toward converged services with unified delivery and management infrastructures. By operating a single network, service providers can minimize capital investments and reduce training & maintenance costs, while offering applications and services that would be impossible over multiple, disconnected networks.

One could argue that the industry (and society as a whole) has already realized significant value from IP networks and IP technology. The Internet has transformed the business and personal lives of billions of people; created entirely new markets and social phenomena; and fuelled growth throughout the developing world. In fact, the proliferation and ubiquity of IP has placed added pressure on non-IP communications to evolve and converge. Innovation and ubiquitous real-time communications are flattening the world and promising an accelerating array of economic and lifestyle enhancements.

Despite this progress, much of the world’s communications remain on traditional, legacy wireless and wireline networks. Interoperability between providers is primitive, services are still not integrated across networks, and many of the systems that providers use to manage operations and bill customers haven’t changed in a decade. Traditional providers are being challenged like never before to innovate and evolve their networks and operations to an integrated IP environment. Competitors (who are not bound by the limitations of embedded infrastructure) are popping up regularly. And governments around the world are slowly changing the rules for competitive service delivery.

What new questions or challenges will this evolution bring about?

The biggest challenges involve the strategy and the timing for migration activities. In other words, “how do I get from here to there?” Few service providers can consider a “wholesale” upgrade to their existing network and support systems, as the business cases for new services generally dictate some kind of incremental transition. Because the technologies for IP services are somewhat complex, and because they continue to evolve at a rapid rate – the decision process, and the timeline for enhancements - remains a challenge.

Regulation presents yet another variable in the evolution equation. On the whole, regulation tends to evolve much less rapidly than technology or even markets. In some cases, regulation has accelerated the proliferation of new IP networks and businesses. Artificially maintained price structures can open up opportunities for new market entries, particularly if they are operating on a lower than market-based cost structure. On the other hand, regulation can often delay or distort investment decisions and in some cases “undo” what the market forces have worked to create.

There now seems to be an emerging trend towards IMS (Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem) - as the preferred framework to create and deliver new IP-centric services.

The following Q&A discusses this trend:

Firstly, can you tell me a little more about IMS?
IMS is a developing reference architecture that separates the application, call or session control, and the transport layers of the network and associated systems. Originally born out of the 3G wireless industry, IMS is being promoted as a means to unify the delivery of new services and rich media applications, based on a ubiquitous IP back-end and independent of the particular access technology used by the subscriber to access services.

Why are people interested in IMS?
There is little that is new in the promise of IMS – our industry has been moving toward a converged voice and data paradigm for at least thirty years. However, the underlying technologies, interface standards, and existing embedded infrastructure have evolved to the point where vendors and service providers can see IMS as a path to accomplishing this convergence. Also, intensifying competitive threats from non-traditional sources such as Microsoft, Google, and Skype are pushing existing participants to accelerate their evolution to a pure IP and Internet enabled model. IMS is one roadmap for this evolution that has been advanced and endorsed, at least by the vendor community.

What impact will this Technology have on the industry in the short and long term?
My personal view is that IMS is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Over the last eighteen months the vendor community has responded with a slew of end-to-end IMS offerings. Some of these are merely existing products packaged with a new label. It’s not yet clear how quickly these vendors will achieve the level of interoperability and standardization necessary for IMS to thrive.

However, from a billing and OSS perspective, there is clearly a need to move toward more flexible, standardized support infrastructures that facilitate innovation and interoperability. Most service providers have existing systems that impede rather than encourage the introduction of new services and new service paradigms. Many of these systems are home grown or have been highly (and somewhat rigidly) customized around an industry that some could argue no longer exists.

While IMS is not specifically about the OSS, the complexity of supporting services and the perceived time to market objectives can only be met by employing contemporary systems technology including web services, service oriented architecture, IPDR data exchange, and so on. In the short term, this can put an enormous strain on the service provider to inventory and assess its current systems, while developing a strategy to migrate, replace, or compartmentalize those systems to make way for the new paradigms. Those providers who accomplish this effectively may well be the winners five or ten years from now. In the long term, these providers need to continue to invest in the personnel and products that will help them meet the challenges of a fully integrated service delivery marketplace.

What would you say are the ‘must have’ elements of an IMS solution today and how are your own solutions addressing these needs?
Well, unlike many legacy players in the market, Rodopi has always been “all-IP.” From the outset, we’ve been involved in the development of new business models and new technologies that support the vision of a converged network and supporting information technology paradigms. Although we have transitional support for legacy protocols and processes, our customers have come to rely on our expertise in harnessing the Internet, web-based applications, and in developing highly automated, integrated service delivery and management solutions.

Some of the things that service providers implementing IMS “must have” from a billing and OSS perspective include: a flexible, real time rating engine that is capable of processing any type of billable transaction and offers the option of plugging in product or customer specific rating algorithms and policies. In addition, sophisticated mediation is required to assimilate and normalize a rich set of usage data, including session types and times, access to and utilization of features, bandwidth, throughput, content, etc., and to correlate these usages with those acquired from other parts of the network or from trading partners. Authentication, identify management and security should be integrated and should extend beyond the borders of any one service provider’s network or suite of applications.

Furthermore, a good IMS solution should offer a service-agnostic design platform and product catalogue, to enable as yet unimagined permutations of integrated applications and trading relationships. The IMS infrastructure should support outsourced applications and content in the native format supplied by the service provider, and it should have well-defined interfaces for trading-required subscriber, service, and transactional data. Finally, support for both client and server roles should be supported for xVNO operations, to provide the service provider with the maximum market flexibility and momentum.

Rodopi’s solutions bring all these elements together, particularly for the service provider who doesn’t have the luxury of a large integration budget or is under competitive pressures to implement these new services quickly. Rodopi has a strong commitment to influencing and adhering to standards as they evolve, while not being constrained in the short term by the lack of ubiquitous interfaces and interactions. We focus on interoperability both at the infrastructure and trading relationship level, believing that the best solutions must encompass multiple vendors, trading partners, and technology domains.

For service providers considering IMS, Rodopi offers a suite of fully web based applications for provisioning, billing and customer care and self-care. These products can be deployed as a turn-key platform for multiple service and multiple network support, or can be implemented as components in a comprehensive OSS/BSS roll-out. Well defined APIs and integration tools ensure flexible connections to application and network servers, and pre-defined service templates accelerate service provider time to market. For more information about Rodopi Software, please visit www.rodopi.com or call 858-410-6985.

About Todd Benjamin and Rodopi Software:
Todd Benjamin has spent 20 years in the telecommunications and hi-tech industries. Mr. Benjamin earned his BSEE in Computer Engineering at the University of Washington and earned an MBA/JD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the president of Rodopi Software – which is a global leader in the design of web-based automation and back office applications that provide provisioning, billing, and automated customer care solutions to Internet service providers (ISPs), hosting service providers (HSPs), application service providers (ASPs), and Internet telephony (VoIP) providers. Rodopi’s solutions are designed to automate time-consuming customer acquisition, service activation, and ongoing support and management processes, enabling service providers to improve service levels, while lowering overhead costs. For more information, visit www.rodopi.com