Evolution towards a Cloud Deployed Business Support System

Abstract

Although less known outside strictly specialized environments, Business Support Systems (BSS) are highly complex and the subject of their installation in cloud implementations is less addressed. This paper presents a short history of BSS evolution, starting from basic voice and messaging services and ending up to 4G and M2M services, presenting new features and their new challenges. Moreover, we present, as a baseline for future developments, a study based on direct interviews with representatives of telecom operators about their vision of possible future BSS solutions depending on the services they will provide. This area of investigation has a certain number of challenges that require collaboration between providers and operators; in this context, we have been established a framework of requirements which will be handled and studied individually.Keywords: Business Support Systems, Cloud implementations, Telecom Providers1 IntroductionIn one of the simplest forms, business support systems (BSS) represent the connection point between external relations (customers, suppliers and partners) and an enterprise's products and services. Moreover, products and services are correlated with corresponding resources, like networking infrastructure, applications, contents and factories [1].Translating into a more comprehensive language, Business Support Subsystems is an aggregation of functions that are used for managing an operator's day-to-day business and providing an operator with complete picture on the performance and management of his diverse lines of businesses.Basically, a BSS has to handle the taking of orders, payment issues, revenues and managing customers, etc. According to eTOM Framework it supports four processes: product management, order management, revenue management and customer management [2].* Product management supports product development, sales and management of products, offers and bundles addressed to businesses and regular customers. Product management regularly includes offering product discounts, appropriate pricing and managing how products relate to one another.* Customer management. Service providers require a single view of the customer and need to support complex hierarchies across customer-facing applications also known as customer relationship management. Customer management also covers the partner management and 24x7 web-based customer self-service.* Revenue management is focused on billing, charging and settlement.* Order management involves taking and handling the customer order. It encompasses four areas: order decomposition, order orchestration, order fallout and order status management.In order to identify the main characteristics several market research methods have been used:* Research of existing BSS software providers and analysis of their top selling products* Interviews with telecom operators' representatives* Other existing studies based on market available products* eTOM standard [3]By following these methods, some quantitative and qualitative key performance indicators were applied that would help us understand the operators' needs and how we can develop this as a collaborative system [4]:* Qualitative: user experience, ability to adopt new services, operator on boarding experience, interconnection between on premise equipment and cloud based software, quality of this interoperation and coordination;* Quantitative: number of customers it can support, number of operators it can support, handling processing peeks and data retention policy.2 Traditional BSS ServicesTraditional telecom networks made money by providing technology to connect users and services that are derived from that technology. To achieve optimum return on investment, network equipment and services investments were made with a very long life cycle. The products' expectation to be in service was from five up to 20 years, but technology evolution proved them wrong. …