All quiet on the Optus OSS front

It was, I am sure, no coincidence that NEC announced a major OSS deal with Optus on the day that Optus announced its Q2 results, as part of parent SingTel's Q2 results announcement.

Optus is trying to play down the importance of a deal that will have far reaching effects on the company for years to come and, if successful, will greatly improve Optus' agility and competitiveness. And if not successful...

NEC subsidiary NetCracker is providing a complete operational support system upgrade to Optus. NetCracker products will support all Optus services - consumer and business - across the entire service fulfilment chain from service order management to network configuration and activation.

The project will take three years to complete and is believed to be one of the biggest of its kind being undertaken by a major telco anywhere in the world.

Optus is saying nothing. Rather than crow about what the deal could mean in terms of efficiency, improved customer service, etc it is keeping its head down. Not that its low profile will make any impact where the news really matters - to Optus major competitors who will be monitoring the project as closely as they can for signs of its impact on Optus' market activities, and for any signs of hiccups.

Gartner has just released its Magic Quadrant for OSS. It has NetCracker as the highest ranked player in the leaders quadrant, marginally ahead of Amdocs and Ericsson. Oracle and IBM are also in the leaders quadrant.

More important though, here is what Gartner has to say about OSS in general: "OSS data is of strategic importance to measure the impact on specific operational, customer and business goals. OSS helps to improve operational efficiency, drive down costs and improve customer experience. ... [OSS data is used] to link operational technical planning with actual customer data, and hence is used by lines of business, marketing, strategic planning, etc.

And like almost every other area of IT, OSS is struggling to keep up with disruption. "The evolution of digital services and of convergent services poses complex challenges for OSS. Challenges include machine to machine (M2M), value-added services (VAS) and B2B (enterprise), as well as the need to provide more competitive personalized services (many of which consist of third party content and components)," Gartner says.

It's believed to be 10 years since Optus undertook a major OSS upgrade, so you can be pretty sure it's existing systems are under stress.

And I have not mentioned one of the biggest disruptions to telcos that is approaching at great speed: the combination of software defined networking and network functions virtualisation.

As Gartner says: "The arrival of NFV and SDN will be disruptive to [telcos'] existing OSS architectures, potentially requiring an upgrade or a new generation of OSSs. Network-facing OSSs — such as provisioning, fault and event, and performance management — must be re-architected to support network and service orchestration functions for hybrid infrastructures."

In short, it would be no exaggeration to say that the future of Optus depends on the success of this project.