Billing Forced to Catch Up with Changing Telecoms IT Needs

The BSS/OSS world is changing rapidly in response to demand-side drivers that are having significant and wide reaching effects on the supply-side of the market according to the latest report by Analysys.

"Drivers of change in the telecoms industry are creating new business imperatives that impact on service providers' IT," says Danny Dicks, co-author of the report. "Few of us would deny that there are currently major changes taking place in the demand side of the global telecoms market, which are now being felt on the supply side. Ericsson's announced acquisition of LHS Telekom is indicative of an ongoing transformation in the vendor landscape that we have predicted and described in our research during the last 18 months."

According to Analysys, changes are being stimulated by three major sets of change drivers:

• Commercial - Examples include the effects of shareholder pressure, increased competition, globalisation, market consolidation and 'green' IT policies
• Technical - The move to next-generation network technology; convergence, both in the sense of convergence towards IP technology and in terms of fixed?mobile convergence; and the advent of complex next-generation services
• Legal and regulatory - Deregulation and significant legislation such as the USA?s Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the EU's data protection and data retention legislation.

"These change drivers are having significant effects on the business processes of service providers, and the systems that support these processes," says Dicks. "Increasingly, telecoms service providers are being benchmarked by their investors on how efficient, how agile and how customer-centric they are ? business goals that have to be supported and enabled by their IT architectures."

"The problem is that legacy IT systems and architectures are far from optimal and are preventing service providers from delivering these goals. This is stimulating major reform, consolidation and re-architecting of back-end systems," he concludes."

Posted to the site on 5th June 2007