When I was working as a reporter at another telecom trade magazine at least 10 years ago my colleague Annie and I were assigned to write part of a special about operational support systems. When Annie asked the news editor to define OSS, he seemed perplexed and was unable to provide a clear answer.
A decade later, defining OSS still is something of challenge. But there are few in the industry who don't have a reasonable handle on the underlying support systems required to allow service providers to receive orders, provision, activate and bill for services; to find, fix, prioritize and even prevent network problems; and to communicate with customers.
These functions are so basic that OSS is one of the few remaining areas of significant investment by service providers in this time of industry upheaval.
The Insight Research Corp. recently reported capital spending by U.S. telecommunications companies in 2002 is 15 percent to 30 percent less than expenditures in 2000 and those declines are expected to continue into 2003. Insight goes on to say that its research suggests the telecom capital spending downturn is not being accompanied by equivalent declines in OSS spending. Insight says OSS sales are forecast to increase at a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 11.9 percent, from $42.1 billion in 2002 to $74.1 billion in 2007. That includes hardware, operating systems and middleware, application software, maintenance and professional services associated with OSSs.
One of the new areas of OSS that offers promise, both for the vendor community and the service providers kicking the tires, is network resource management software. As RHK Inc. writes in its July 2002 report "Network Resource Management: Inventory Takes Stage," NRM includes and extends traditional inventory systems to automate the complex task of keeping inventory records accurate. It links different data sources and reconciles different views of network inventory, promising more profitability through operational efficiencies and better visibility and control of capital investments.
RHK expects service providers to spend $200 million on NRM this year and $1.3 billion on NRM by 2005.
In 2002 and 2003 RHK expects NRM to be driven by the need to lower operations costs. NRM can do this by eliminating mistakes in the provisioning process and helping pinpoint root causes of problems.
A key part of improving provisioning through NRM -- and even lowering capex -- is commonly referred to as asset discovery/recovery. RHK claims a whopping $10 billion in network assets in North America alone could be recovered and reused with NRM technology. Read more about this opportunity in this month's cover story.
Until next time,
Paula Bernier
Editor in Chief
