"There's lots of flow through for high-volume services like residential DSL," notes Larry Goldman, RHK Inc.'s OSS global program director. But automated service delivery remains elusive for many other, more complicated services like wavelength provisioning, he says, because of inventory inaccuracy.
Flow-through DSL
A key piece in the success of flow-through provisioning on the DSL front has been the delivery of self-install kits to residential subscribers both in the United States and abroad. Of course, these front-end systems need to tie in with systems that are automated within the telcos themselves.
"Self-install kits have become the preferred means for prequalifying and activating new broadband subscribers, accounting for between 85 percent and 95 percent of activations in Europe's leading markets," says Jonathan Doran, Yankee Group Convergent Communications Europe senior analyst. "The substantial savings on truck rolls and call center loads associated with self-install have been instrumental in enabling the price reductions necessary to drive mass-market adoption. The savings also help operators manage the ballooning costs of adding tens of thousands of new customers each month."
Terry Burroughs, executive director of OSS infrastructure at Telcordia, says the company's DSL service provider customers are able to activate 15,000 to 20,000 DSL orders a week "98 percent touch free."
The Missing Piece
Still, many sources say the claims surrounding flow-through service delivery automation often are overstated. But the provisioning systems themselves aren't always the problem; inaccurate network inventory is often the showstopper.
"You often get to the point where you have to roll back services because it doesn't deploy to the network properly," explains Dan Baker, research director for Technology Research Institute. "If your inventory is not accurate, you're not going to achieve flow through anyway." But help is one the way through new service delivery automation tools from companies like CoManage, Syndesis and others, he says. (For more on asset recovery and discovery, click here.)
Kent A. Steffen, Telution's president and CEO, says, unlike the trade show demonstrations that show flow-through provisioning happening within seconds, carriers can't just activate services with the click of a mouse. "You first need to check credit and do a dozen other things," he says. Among the flow-through service delivery automation challenges, he says, are creating business rules for how to manage the product catalog, what affiliations are in place with what other organizations and how much of a cut those companies will receive. However, the biggest thing carriers need to work through before achieving flow-through provisioning is what happens when the service can't be automatically provisioned, says Steffen.
To address that problem Telution has built a workflow engine that handles flow through and, when people have to get involved in the process, provides a tool to share all necessary information upstream and downstream to all systems, like billing and fraud control OSSs, and to all people involved, Steffen says.
Workflow engines are becoming standard in many newer flow-through provisioning tools. For example, Agilent's new OSS Fulfillment-Optical flow-through provisioning solution integrates new releases of workflow and activation tools Agilent got through its acquisition of OSI along with provisioning and inventory tools provided through a partnership with Cramer Systems.
Workflow also plays a major part in a new product lifecycle management product from OSS startup Joule Software. IntrOSSpect, which becomes commercially available this month, creates a palette that enables service providers to choose and combine reusable network service components to create new services, explains Joule spokesman Rob Crawley. The system then distributes via e-mail information on which resources it plans to use for a service to the appropriate organization within a telco as well as to its external distribution channels like resellers and agents. IntrOSSpect also tracks the status of requests for approval or action on the new product from each of those organizations. Once approved, appropriate information on the new service is also sent to product catalogs and other databases automatically.
The product evolved from a product Joule's predecessor Trapdoor developed for Verio, for which Joule president and CEO Bill Games used to work. The company initially is targeting the products to the RBOCs "because they have the biggest mess. Their data are fragmented all over the organization," says Crawley.
