Telecom OSS Strategies

Raymond Raud
April, 2000

Operation Support Systems (OSS) are as critical part of telecommunications service provider's business assets as the network equipment and facilities. Acknowledged in the industry, the OSS's are likely to provide the competitive advantage as they capture the knowledge of the few best people and enable efficient asset management. Industry spending is a good indicator of OSS importance. Estimated by various authoritative sources between $20 - $30 Billion dollars in year 2000 it counts for significant portion of total industry spending in infrastructure. Since most of the new service providers for well known business reasons thrive to belong to Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) category, I will be using this term below in the text.

I wrote this, no-nonsense story from few years of experience in operating, building, integrating, building more OSS's in telecom. It may benefit CLEC's in various stages of their corporate development pondering best strategies for OSS's.

Different stages in life present different sets of issues. OSS's are no different. To avoid boring the reader the material is in two almost independent sections:

Feel free to benefit from my experience. There can be no implied or explicit guarantees that my conclusions are applicable or valid for reader's specific situation.

Questions, comments, confirming and disagreeing observations are all welcomed, discussion is very much encouraged

Telecom OSS Strategies

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