Grande’s Henry Jacobsen |
Having seen others get burned by handing over grandiose OSS integration projects to third parties, service providers increasingly are playing a bigger role in projects to tie together various back office systems. And, in many cases, they are taking a more incremental approach to this task.
“I’m noticing providers that are successful in these integration efforts are really keeping them a lot closer to the vest than they have in past,” says Frank Dickinson, senior vice president of product management and marketing at Daleen Technologies Inc. “They want to own the product, they want to understand it.”
What’s key is that carriers understand how the back office and OSS integration tie in with their business plans, says Henry Jacobsen, CIO/CTO at Grande Communications Networks Inc., a CLEC that sells a bundle of voice, video and data services primarily to residential customers over its fiber-tothe- curb network. “For us to compete affectively with incumbents, we need to differentiate on cost and speed of installation and quality of service,” says Jacobsen, whose company competes with incumbents SBC Communications Inc. and Time Warner. “We look at our back office systems as a vehicle for quality customer care. We do it all in house. We have done most efforts ourselves with a combination of commercial software and some systems we’ve chosen to write in house.”
Jacobsen says there are five correct procedures for back office design.
The first is how the back office effort meets corporate functional requirements. “You must be taking care of business,” he says. The second is to examine existing functions and either utilize or integrate them. The third is to look at the company’s expected requirements five or more years down the road and make sure the back office will be scalable to those plans.
Cbeyond’s Joe Oesterling |
The fourth procedure is to ensure least-cost implementation. “You just can’t break the bank by buying systems,” says Jacobsen. “This includes buy vs. build and looking at the entire life costs of your systems.”
Finally, service providers must look at how these systems interconnect. However, Jacobsen says integration should not be one of the first things on a carrier’s back office agenda. “Too many companies brought in consultants to try to give them complete systems at once,” he says. “We’ve all observed many CLECs overspending on back office,” he adds. “It took some $30 million, $40 million, $50 million just for the first bill. These CLECs tried to integrate everything immediately” but that doesn’t make sense because “as processes changed they were trying to bring OSS along with it.” So Jacobsen has done OSS integration incrementally, having chosen products with APIs or some data schema so it can exchange data between different systems. To date, Grande has spent less than $4 million for its entire back office, says Jacobsen.
Daleen’s Dickinson says in many cases APIs are the foundation for bringing together products from different vendors and for different functions. He suggests service providers might want to talk to people within vendor users groups to get a feel for how different vendors’ equipment can fit in with the total back office. Dickinson says many service providers are moving away from using specialized EAI solutions and toward more general tools employing XML and Java Messaging Service to integrate different back office systems in a more open, generic and multivendor-friendly way.
Joe Oesterling, the CIO at Cbeyond Communications, an IPbased voice and data company that serves small business in Atlanta, Dallas-Forth Worth and Denver, says carriers can do point-to-point integration or use what he calls a 100 percent insulated architecture. He says each has value and Cbeyond has used a hybrid of the two.“We do lots of point-to-point integration, but we’re leveraging publish to subscribe for Web-based applications to insulate the Web applications we’re integrating.”
However, Cbeyond recently abandoned a singular message bus, having replaced a Vitria Technology Inc. solution with a J2E messaging infrastructure. Cbeyond uses XML/XSL to do data transformation and JMS, or Java messaging service, to do message delivery between the company’s Siebel Systems Inc. order entry and order management systems and its Daleen billing products.
(XSL is a data transformation capability used to transform XML data.) It is a separate EAI that uses publish and subscribe of Web services, says Oesterling, “but it’s isolated so if I have a problem with the EAI layer or a problem with Siebel [for example], that doesn’t affect any other applications.”
Cbeyond also elected to outsource some parts of its back office, including E911 management to Intrado Inc. and ILEC gateway functionality to NightFire Software Inc. “If you do outsourcing for cost savings, you’ll end up bringing it back in house,” Oesterling says. “But if you get an Intrado and NightFire with deep process expertise you don’t have, it really makes sense.”
One of the key goals Cbeyond has had relating to its OSS/BSS is to create a single customerfacing system that allows people interfacing with customers to have all the information they need from a single system, says Oesterling. The company is pretty far along with that effort, having started with the front end and then worked on back office components.
In addition to its systems integration success, e-commerce has been key for the company, he says. Due to its back office efforts, Cbeyond has never mailed a paper bill, a practice that Oesterling says already has saved the company at least $1 million and allowed it to realize revenue more quickly that it would have otherwise. This also means Cbeyond can get bills to customers more quickly, typically within 25 days vs. what Oesterling says is the standard 40 days. In addition to the 100 percent online billing, about 30 percent of Cbeyond’s customer payments are made online, he adds, “which is incredible.”
Oesterling says Cbeyond now is working to solve what he calls the second paradigm shift in e-commerce — customer care. “We are solving that with very aggressive development capabilities for customer self care beginning in June.”
A key component of that will be a knowledge base of answers online. For Cbeyond another part will be to allow customers to manage their applications online (such as allowing customers to add an e-mail box, change passwords or modify phone features through a Web interface at any time of day or night).
