It’s no secret that telecom industry is going through a major transformation. With traditional telecom services no longer driving revenues, there is an urgency to bring new services to the market quickly. To fulfill this requirement, cutting-edge telecom OSS BSS solutions are required and they are needed ASAP.
The biggest reason why your business needs new operation support system (OSS) is the unprecedented speed of evolution in the telecom industry. Consider this: It took two decades for OSS platform to shift from manual to digital. But since digitalization, the trickle of new services has turned into a flood. 3G has given way to 5G, OTT services are all the rage now and IoT is expected to bend the rules like never before. All this has happened in very little time and the pace of development is only expected to increase. If you are thinking of staying on your heels and waiting for the changes to happen, then you are making a huge mistake. It is time to think fast and make a move to a futuristic operation support system sooner than your competitors.
The Characteristics of a Futuristic Operation Support System
Before procuring a new operation support system, you need to know about the important characteristics of an OSS that can improve your business. Below is a list:
- A central repository for data: A centralized data store lays down the foundation of a futuristic operation support system. If you are looking to provide a worthwhile Omni channel experience to your users, then you cannot have disparate data repositories. You need to keep your business data and your customers’ account information at a readily accessible central location. In case, you don’t have a central repository for data, you will face problems in authenticating and authorizing your customers.
- Quick activation of services: Customers expect their services to start as soon as they click on the payment button on your portal. Although instantaneous delivery of services is not possible in all cases, your OSS should be quicker than your competitors in provisioning services. Also, modern-day customers are more informed than ever before and seek self-service option to create their own personal service plans. Therefore, it is essential that you procure telecom OSS BSS solutions with this functionality.
- Complete automation: Without this feature, you won’t be able to provision different services for your customers on the fly. Every layer of your operation support system – virtualized or non-virtualized – should work at the same pace and there should never be a bottleneck due to the slow rate of processing at a particular layer. For this to happen, complete automation of OSS provisioning is a pre-requisite.
- Fault tolerance, fault discovery and self-healing: When you have a diverse and fully-automated operation support system, faults are bound to happen. Hence, fault tolerance i.e. the capability of the system to work suitably when under a fault should be high. Moreover, your OSS should have the functionality to discover faults by itself and run an automatic process to fix them before they compromise your operations.
Conclusion The blinding pace of development in the telecom industry requires telcos to be ready with the latest telecom billing software solutions to meet new business requirements. Deploying a quality operation support system should be at the top of your priority list as it is integral to any business operation. Therefore, it is essential that you select your OSS with great care. Always ensure that your OSS can provide you with essential functionalities such as automation, fault tolerance, fast service provisioning and a central repository for data.