Integrated solutions will manage complex next generation telecom networks: HP

The convergence of voice, data and information technology infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions and frequent service evolution are requiring service providers to constantly change if they wish to continue delivering and managing their services effectively.

HP Software recently announced in Beijing the strengthening of its OpenView Operations Support System (OSS) portfolio for telecom network and service providers.

Jacques Conand, director, OpenView OSS Products, HP, talks to Business Standard about the various issues confronting telcos today and how they can effectively address them.

What are the key problems facing telcos in today's world as they grapple with a host of new technologies?

Many service providers have developed overlapping network operations activities over time through, for example, mergers, creation of new business units and introduction of new infrastructure.

Separate groups managing IT, IP and network infrastructure is one example of the problem. Often multiple network operations centres are in place as a result of these factors, impacting the entire service lifecycle.

Further, each of these groups may have chosen different processes, different vendors' applications or done their own development. Communications services continue to evolve, as service providers seek competitive differentiation and sources of new revenue.

Increasingly, IT is part of the service. This is the case with mobile data and content services, where the service itself is delivered via computing servers to terminals that are explicitly or implicitly computing devices, and with voice over IP or Internet services.

Managing such services has become complex as the IT and telecom communities have evolved towards different management interfaces and different levels of instrumentation in their infrastructure. These factors add cost and inefficiencies to the operations of the network and services and make ensuring service quality a challenge.

Can you elaborate these issues with some key pain points?

For example, billing for such services is also complex. Current billing infrastructure may not be flexible enough. This is particularly true when services are billed on a usage basis, rather than just a flat-rate basis.

Usage data is not standardised as it is in the pure voice world. Further, to offer such services to prepaid users mandates that their usage be accounted for in near real time.

The new usage data itself is also a gold mine of information about services, customers and their usage patterns and therefore must be available for fraud detection, revenue assurance and business intelligence systems.

Another element is to ensure customer satisfaction for these, as well as most other services. This means ensuring quality expectations are met for each customer. Customers are more and more concerned about quality in a competitive market.

Yet the customer's perception of quality may be quite different from a service provider's internally measured metrics. They may be linked as much to order handling, billing and call centre experience, as the actual service availability and delivered quality.

All these factors must be somehow accounted for to manage a true customer perception of a service.

How has the telecom industry evolved with this highly demanding market scenario?

Market conditions today show that the telecom industry is moving out of a period of retrenchment and into a new phase of growth, where new service and infrastructure investments again become a priority.

Thereby arises the need to adapt quickly to changes. Specifically by rapidly introducing and withdrawing services, changing network infrastructure for efficiency, changing staff priority by service and customer and making best use of existing OSS infrastructure by adapting it to new needs.

What are the solutions HP offers to manage this complexity?

At HP, we believe that the ultimate challenge, for both IT infrastructure and telecom infrastructure is to reconfigure the infrastructure, business processes and staff priorities dynamically based on the business needs.

HP Adaptive Enterprise is the umbrella programme for this vision. Within this umbrella, a dynamic OSS implements the ability to synchronise the OSS with business priorities and adapt to change.

The flexibility required for an Adaptive Enterprise is built into HP's OSS offerings, starting with the HP Integrated Service Management Framework, which ensures flexibility in business processes and choice of OSS application.

Within this, each HP OpenView OSS application is architected to be easily customised and is tightly integrated with other HP OpenView products. Our Business Service Management solution helps tune business processes.

Our service quality management capabilities will help service providers prioritise OSS activities by customers and service, while our activation tools can actually reconfigure the network infrastructure on the fly. For example, if an IP VPN is jeopardised, an action can be set to automatically reconfigure router queues or transport bandwidth.

Our solutions span the key operations support system and business support system processes such as service delivery, also known as fulfillment, service assurance and service usage or billing and provide the breadth and flexibility to meet operations needs today and for the future.

Operators in India are talking and thinking about adopting 3G services in the near future. What are the areas of concerns they should contend with, especially from the technology point of view?

From the point of view of management there are some important considerations such as the following. With 3G come the potential for richer and more capable advanced data services.

Managing these requires comprehensive IT infrastructure management (i.e. servers, storage, database and other applications) combined with telecom management (i.e. IP, radio access, transport and switching).

Service level management becomes critical since we expect customers to pay for these services. Best effort is no longer enough.

With complete 3G coverage operators may be facing more cell sites than they had with 2G. Operator experience shows alarm volumes can be much higher than before.