Accelerate OSS/BSS agility by migrating to a new generation OSS based on XML and Web services

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Microsoft Communications Sector Solution Overview

If Microsoft delivers successfully

on its promises, there is no doubt that it will change the competitive landscape of the OSS/BSS marketplace.

ntil now, there has been a lack of industry standards for the integration of operations and business support services (OSS/BSS) applications within telecommunications businesses. This has rendered interoperability between systems extremely complex, making them costly to build and maintain, and having a direct impact on operational costs and quality of service. It also affects operators profitability by impairing their agility the ability to rapidly deploy new products and services to gain a competitive edge in an ever-changing environment. XML and Web services are revolutionizing the way that organizations exchange and act on data. Microsoft applications and technologies provide the best way to develop and deploy OSS/BSS applications and take advantage of this revolution. Led by the TeleManagement Forum, the New Generation Operation Systems and Software (NGOSS) initiative is now well engaged in defining an industry-wide business framework. This opens the way for implementing NGOSS specifications using generic off-the-shelf products that natively support XML technologies, rather than of proprietary packages. This is good news for telecommunications service providers and other xSPs that need open, flexible, and powerful solutions to manage their OSS/BSS systems.

Scott Donahue, Karl Whitelock Stratecast Partners

CUSTOMER PROFILE
In the fixed, mobile or broadband markets alike, telecommunications operators need complex applications to manage their customers or operate their network and services. These mission-critical systems are strategic assets as they largely determine operator profitability.

BUSINESS SITUATION
Lack of industry standards has left telecommunications operators with a mix of applications with overlapping capabilities and proprietary interfaces. Business efficiency requires these systems to interoperate and evolve, which is currently extremely costly. This limits the operators ability to innovate and compete.

SOLUTION
Expose native legacy system interfaces as XML Web services. Define a company-wide reference model of business entities based on NGOSS, and map legacy interfaces to this model. Incrementally migrate business processes to an agile, XML-based business process management platform implementing NGOSS processes.

BENEFITS
Increased

agility in the OSS/BSS architecture, dramatically reducing cost of change. existing systems to adapt/migrate to a target architecture based on NGOSS. Low-risk, stepped approach.

Allows

Situation
OSS/BSS systems are at the heart of any telecommunications or other service provider operation. An OSS system is required to support operational issues such as account activation, provisioning, service assurance, and usage/metering. A BSS system is needed for billing including invoicing, rating, taxation, and collections and customer management including order entry, customer self services, customer care, trouble ticketing, and customer relationship management. While the basic concepts of provisioning and billing sound easy, effectively integrating processes such as ordering and billing has proven expensive and extremely complex. Integration elements have traditionally been proprietary systems, meaning that they conform to no single set of standards. This has often resulted in lengthy and costly customization processes for service providers, requiring that they either retool their procedures to extend existing systems or build entirely new applications. While the ideal is to create best-ofbreed solutions, the reality has made assembling such solutions impractical, expensive, and time-consuming due to the volume of custom code required. The wave of mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications service provider industry has only intensified the pain of dealing with nonstandard systems. Integration technology has not kept pace with the rate of change in the OSS/BSS environment. For years, service providers have pushed for standards that would make it easy to integrate applications from multiple vendors, but these efforts have not been very successful. Fortunately, an industry effort, led by the TeleManagement Forum, combining expertise from telecommunications operators, network equipment providers and software vendors is defining an industry-wide business framework to standardize upon. Initially focused on defining a taxonomy with the Telecom Operation Map (then extended to eTOM), this effort led to a New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) initiative that is now working at defining architecture principles as well as modeling telecommunications business entities (such as a customer, account, service, and product). With these standards emerging, industry convergence towards interoperable systems and open interfaces is now becoming a reality.

The TM Forum standards have

been critical for Telecom Italia: the time savings for introducing new services have been incredible. To give an idea: in the early 1990s we used to add one or two services per year; in the late 1990s that went up to four or five. Now we're doing more than 20 new offers per year. Without NGOSS that rate of introduction wouldn't have been possible.

Saverio Orlando, Head of the OSS Department Telecom Italia IT

TMF eTOM Business Process Framework identifies all main business activities in a telecommunications service provider.

Solution
After considering CORBA, and more recently, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), the information technology industry is now universally endorsing XML as a core technology to standardize the different aspects of an enterprise framework. This has spawned numerous XML-based specification efforts (such as XML Schema, XSLT, WSDL, UDDI, and BPEL) defined and adopted by most software vendors, with a growing number of off-the-shelf products supporting them because of their multiple benefits. Deal with different standards For any telecommunications operator, typical OSS/BSS processes span across many different applications based on different technologies including mainframes, Unix and Windows servers) that need to communicate, whether these applications reside within the same intranet or across different companies (such as a mobile operator and its resellers). Built on open standards such as TCPIP, XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, XML Web services provide a common foundation for creating interoperable systems that can be quickly integrated with existing systems. Validate and convert data By representing OSS/BSS data as XML, the myriad data formats used in any given OSS/BSS implementation can be integrated without requiring changes to the current system data models. With data integrity errors at the root of many OSS/BSS problems, one benefit of using XML is the framework it provides for executing sophisticated data validation and conversion from one model to another. Manage business processes Also based on XML, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is now emerging as a standard to define and execute business processes. Thanks to BPEL-enabled tools, designing, testing and deploying business processes has become much simpler, even for nonprogrammers. This means business processes can easily be modified, making the operator more agile at automating costly operations or leveraging new business opportunities. Off-the-shelf software Natively built on XML, Microsoft technology, including Microsoft Windows 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, provides the ideal platform for developing and deploying XML-based next-generation OSS/BSS solutions.

Data model transformation with BizTalk Server 2004

Business process definition in BizTalk Server 2004

Crm

SID

SID

Billing

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 is well fitted to implement TMF NGOSS processes, as presented on a TMF Catalyst project at TeleManagement World 2004 in Dallas, USA.

eTOM BPM

SOFTWARE AND SERVICES Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows 2003 Microsoft Office Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Microsoft Commerce Server Microsoft Host Integration Server Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Microsoft Application Center Microsoft Consulting Services

A versatile application framework As a pioneer in XML adoption and Web services, Microsoft has built native support for XML standards throughout its product line for the desktop (including Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office XP), as well as for server applications (including Microsoft Windows 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004). Combined, these products provide a highly versatile end-to-end architecture (from client to middleware to application to storage) that can be tailored to meet any vertical industry requirement. Because of this unprecedented flexibility brought by XML, Microsoft has been able to extend these products with industry-specific solutions with minimal effort. Such industry-specific components include BizTalk Server Accelerator for RosettaNet (electronic SCM), BizTalk Server Accelerator for HIPAA (healthcare), and BizTalk Accelerator for Swift (financial services). Microsoft has been a member of the TeleManagement Forum for many years, and is now working with partners to assist operators in taking advantage of NGOSS through XML, at their own pace.

While some operators will have the opportunity to implement NGOSS principles on new applications, in most cases, the priority will be to expose existing application interfaces as XML and Web services, and define the conversion to an eTOM-based data model. It will then be possible to start migrating or implementing according to eTOM those business processes that most benefit from agility (because of their complexity or their frequent need for change) on a business process management platform such as Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004. Even though NGOSS efforts will take years to complete, operators should start evaluating the impact and the benefits of migrating their OSS/BSS architecture towards eTOM. Whether they ultimately decide to adopt eTOM or not, it is highly likely they will see compelling reasons to evolve towards an XML-based architecture that provides the business agility they need.

Software for the Agile Business

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com For more information about Microsoft solutions for telecommunications and media, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders For specific information regarding Microsoft solutions for eTOM, please contact Jrme Hannebelle at: jeromha@microsoft.com. About the TeleManagement Forum The TeleManagement Forum is a non-profit global organisation that provides leadership, strategic direction and practical solutions to improve the operation and management of information communications services. Its open membership of over 340 companies comprises service providers, computing and network equipment suppliers, software solution suppliers and customers of communication services. www.tmforum.org

2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, BizTalk, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Date Published: November 2003