Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Hello, you're watching the Digital Support Systems Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels. And today's discussion introduces the concept of next generation OSS and BSS solutions. New technology choices and a commitment to the public cloud are amongst the drivers that are pushing this development. But how do these systems differ from legacy OSS and BSS solutions? How exactly are they converging and what benefits do they bring to telcos? Well, let's find out, and I'm delighted to say that joining me on the program today are Beth Cohen, SDN Network product Strategy for Verizon Business Group. Soumava Dutta, principal Enterprise Architect Telecom Systems business at Dell Technologies, and John Abraham, principal analyst with Appledore Research. Hello everyone. Really good to see you all. Lots to talk about as usual today. So let's start with our first question and let's put this into context. What is lacking with today's legacy based OSS and BSS solutions if indeed anything is lacking and why do we need to rethink our approach, Beth, as our resident telco on the panel today? Perhaps you could start off with your thoughts.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (01:55):
Be glad. So where should I start? It's a laundry list. So Telco's legacy OSS and BSS systems over time, and I should point out that many of these systems can be 10, 20 or more years old. They get crushed over time. And just to get started with some of the issues, and I should point out, many of them have actually already moved into the cloud. So they're not necessarily cloud native, but they're not necessarily running on pieces of dedicated hardware anymore. However, many of the systems were built with assumptions about telco services that are no longer valid or have changed over time. So they might be tied to a specific location. This is an actual example where we're selling these services in the cloud. So that's just one of the many issues. And of course, just as mergers and acquisitions come, we have all these systems that need to interoperate.

(03:19):
There's also a lot of pressure from our customers to access this data in new and interesting ways. These were typically closed systems in the past and there's a lot of requirements where yes, we need to secure this data. Of course this is CPNI or I type data, so that needs to be kept private, but we also, our customers want to get access to this data appropriately so they can use it within their own systems. So a lot of complexities and a lot of things that were decisions that were made 10, 15, 20 years ago are no longer valid and that's really hurting these, the systems in it and the need for a rethink.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:14):
Great. Thanks Beth. Great. Start putting things into context for us there. John, let's come across to you research this area. What are you seeing and why do you think we may need a rethink?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (04:26):
Well, I think just to add what Beth said, systems generally are a reflection of the structure they serve. And remember we are talking about telcos who've been around for 30, 40 years and over a period again has been pointed out the priorities and strategy to get there have evolved and we have ended up with a peg of systems that have been added over a period of time for what variety. Some of them within certain departments are not even universally applied across the organization, but restricted to specific types of or specific departments. Now the end result is, as I said, a gerty of systems that are often interacting with each other with a number of customized interfaces and so on. So that's clearly not the approach that we can carry on to the future. For one, the customer preferences are changing what they expect of the service provider has evolved.

(05:30):
Competition is evolving. You don't have as much time as you did maybe a decade ago to go to market with new offerings. It has to be and likely that with the legacy systems that you have, you can do that. So that's why I think fundamentally there is a need to. But the point I wanted to just add here that I think it's also as much as it's ology shift, as I said at the beginning, systems are a reflection of the structure. So sometimes or oftentimes I have seen examples of modern systems deployed within some telco environments which are unable to reach their potential because the structure in ways more than one limits won't be extracted from those systems. So I think just goes to say that these two go hand in hand. You can have the greatest technology, but you also need to have a culture and structure that allows you to actually use it in a way like that.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:35):
Great. Thanks very much John. And let's go across also to Soumava. What are your thoughts on the situation that stands at the moment and the need to change?

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (06:46):
Thank you guy. Like John and Beth said, right? The major problem with this legacy USS, which has been dated for like 20, 30 years nowadays is their monolithic architecture. That has not changed yet. The monolithic architecture needs that orientation where we would need to pivot towards the microservices, where we would need to pivot towards the newer technologies like John also mentioned, and have that cultural shift so that we are not based on most of these legacy systems, which are often siloed and don't talk to each other in a well coordinated manner. So based on that, we definitely need to rethink how we can have the O-S-S-B-S-S system together, talking very politely to each other, transferring the data from across those systems and communicating in a seamless manner.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:44):
Thanks very much Soumava. Now I'd just like to stay with you for a moment because Beth mentioned that we've already seen some systems move to the cloud, but they're not necessarily cloud native, the emergence of cloud native architectures and practices. How does this affect a telco support systems and what actually changes when the legacy software is replaced with cloud native based software?

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (08:08):
Oh, it's a huge list, right? The benefits are in, I would say it's a huge list of benefits. For example, when we go towards a cloud native architecture, we are bringing in that microservice concept with it. And when we bring with that microservice concept each API, it's more towards an API towards API and API integration and the concept of network APIs comes into the landscape. That's 0.1, 0.2. The code itself, it's not monolithic. You don't have to, it's more agile and it can be deployed on infrastructure and the concept of infrastructure as a code comes into the picture. So that also helps in level setting and transforming the O-S-S-B-S-S landscape or the record applications like for example, inventory, like for example, surface fulfillment, like for example the charging or the billing systems, which it does not talk to each other. It does talk. And now we have one seamless system, which is now giving us that analysis.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:20):
Great, thanks. And Beth, as Soumava said, a lot changes when we adopt the cloud native approach.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (09:29):
Yeah, I do want to pick up on what he was talking about because particularly around APIs, because these systems are not monolithic, they're actually typically have grown over time. So they're sort of blobs of applications that are sort of stuck together to a certain extent with smoke and mirrors. So the API concept is super important when you're integrating these systems, I shouldn't say sticking them together, we're really integrating them in a much, much better than we have in the past. And the APIs also give us the flexibility to make those changes that we need. As the systems change, the rate of change of the systems has accelerated significantly. So how we consume the services, I've been working on network as a service, and what that really is, is it's a way of putting the systems together so that they can be consumed as a whole and can be purchased in a new and different way. Our OSS and BSS systems have to support this, and as it changes, we need to be able to make rapid changes to our systems to support new billing models, new operational models, new ways that we integrate with our customers, new ways that we integrate with cloud services, cloud providers, and the entire ecosystem. So we are no longer monolithic behind the walls. These systems do need to interact outside of just sending an invoice to our customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:31):
Thanks very much. Beth leads us very nicely to our next question. And John, if I can bring you in on this one first, Beth was mentioning the emergence of new models and approaches. What are the tangible benefits in moving towards next generation systems and how can TURs measure the effectiveness of this transition?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (11:52):
Well, that's a great question. For me, the biggest benefit of moving to next gen BSS and OSS digital systems is agility. It's the ability to actually participate in opportunities that in the past completely bypassed you as a telco. Now that's to me what core agility enable. I'd like to point out though that when we talk about transformations, we spend a lot of time discussing the cost of transforming. And let's just say we get a ballpark figure for how much it takes to go from A to B. And many times there's cost overrun as some of these transformations take longer than we. But in general, we don't spend as much time talking about what does it mean to knock on what is cost of not transforming to the next generation of PE systems. And I think that's part of the reason why some of the metrics when we talk about how do telcos measure the effectiveness of the transition, that can be a bit challenging.

(12:59):
Oftentimes at the organization level, even though the nation might be down to select the departments at the organization level, there is an expectation that some of these transformation leads to maybe an improved customer satisfaction. Usually measured through metrics like an NPS or a customer experience index or something as common as churn rate to see if the investment, those new digital systems have had any sort of an impact on these metrics. Or it could be TCO, what's the cost of supporting and maintaining some of the legacy systems? How much of that has been saved? What's the cost of making a certain change? What is the scale at which we can operate in a certain region? And if we need to take it beyond that, how much does it cost us? How long does it take? So the total TC come up as a metric that is tracked at the organization level within the specific departments.

(14:00):
There is a lot more granularity in the metrics that's actually being used. Oftentimes that means the average handling time, the amount of trial coming into the call centers, how satisfied are customers, what's the average handling time? How long does it take a sales agent to respond to RFIs, how many RFIs have we closed in a certain period of time, so on and so forth. So there's a lot of efficiency related metrics that can often be used to track it, but at the organization level, oftentimes it has to come down to improve CA or customer satisfaction reduced TCO or far improved time to market.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (14:43):
Great. Thanks very much John. Very comprehensive. Lots of metrics there to be aware of. Beth, let me bring you in at this point. What's your views?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (14:52):
Metrics are obviously very important, but I think there's been, again, there's been a shift in what are considered good metrics. Customer satisfaction was 20 years ago, customer satisfaction was definitely, I mean yes, we had the metric, but I think the telcos were sort of famous for having terrible customer satisfaction every time there would be surveys of which companies were considered the hardest to deal with. And telcos were always down near the bottom next to the cable companies and there's been a big shift and these OSS and BS systems are supporting that huge shift of understanding that the customer wants to buy their systems on the web, they don't want to talk to an agent anymore. So that's one part of the shift and obviously the systems need to support that. And that also applies to the operational side. Again, customers are using chat box, they're using, they don't want to talk to anybody, they just want to get it done. And of course the financial metrics don't go away. So there's total cost of ownership type metric, and in the investment cost of updating these systems, it is significant. So all of these very complex interactions need to be taken into consideration when we're looking at moving to cloud native OSS and BSS systems.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:43):
Great. Thanks so much Beth. I'm surprised they haven't replaced me with a chatbot. I'm sure they're planning on it, but until that horrible day arrives. Moving on, we have OSS, we have BSS. Is there any value to combining the OSS and BSS roles into one unified solution perhaps in terms of data pipeline management or operational efficiencies? Beth, lemme stay with you for a moment on this one. Is there any value in this approach?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (17:13):
We're already there. So in fact I, I'm currently working on a new product and we're doing a grooming of the user stories right now. And all the parties, the OSS side, the BSS side are all there. So when we think through for a new product, quote cash that includes the operational aspects, that's critical. So I would say, I can't speak for other telcos, but Verizon is very, definitely thinks of these systems very holistically and understands that they are all part of a whole of an ecosystem, if you will, or of systems that deliver the services to our customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (18:02):
Great. Beth, that's encouraging use. I'm glad Verizon's doing this. Soumava, let's come across to you. What are you seeing with say all the telcos and the more holistic approach of combining these two into perhaps a unified platform?

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (18:22):
Absolutely, Guy, and coming from Dell and looking across all the CSPs, I can see that yes, every CSP is on their way to having this as one consolidated platform calling the next gen operational systems or digital operational systems support systems. Combining this operational support systems and business support systems into a single unified solution actually presents its way for a transformative journey in the telcos. Unifying this helps us getting a consolidated data pipeline, which helps us in getting a 360 degree view of the network and the customer integrations. It helps us gaining the real time insights of how the customer is performing, how the network is performing for the customer, how the behavior of the customer is towards the network and how is his usage going up and down so that it helps the telcos create customized plans, customized network output, or again, in terms of 5g, in terms of slices if need be, how do we present with the customer with a specific slice if we have to and present with various customer offerings. It also helps in very much of predictive analysis. Okay, if the network is going down at certain times, what is that causing? And it can help the oss as well as the BSS layer to act dynamically and adaptively on that, combining it and not act on one specific silos and each on its shell.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (20:07):
Great. Very encouraging. Soumava, that's good to hear. We're going to go back to Beth in a moment, but first of all, let me bring in John. John, what are you seeing here? What are your thoughts?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (20:18):
Well, I agree with all the points raised here already. I'll point out that the lines are already blurring between OSS and BSS, especially when we come down the order management stack, which is where usually the handover happens. There's a lot of blurring of lines between who owns what, be it from a vendor perspective or even from an operator perspective. But that is not to say that we are anywhere close to having a unified OSS and BSS for the majority of the market. I think there'll always be exceptions, mainly because this is going to be an expensive affair that has got a lot of risk for disrupting operations in the shortterm medium term. There is a lot of specific, be it about the APIs used, how some of the interaction points are coded and so on When it comes to BSS and OSS and in general, they have remained separate experts maintaining this level of information within their own specific products.

(21:21):
So merging them is something that has got a lot of implications, some of which we have, I think we can address the others we are not even aware of. So I think Beth is probably right. This is something that some of the larger operators who've got the ability to actually manage its large projects and maybe some of the really smaller operators for whom the operations are far less complex, are able to address. I think the mid tier are actually going to take a fair bit of time to actually get to a point of having unified OSIS and VSS. That's my thinking at least.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (21:58):
Well, very interesting. John, thanks for those insights. And Beth, let's come back to you and pick up some additional thoughts on this question.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (22:06):
Yeah, SVA just sparked, one of the other benefits of integrating these systems is that we can offer better SLAs because, and credits. So we've been doing a lot of work around automating SLAs and automating the credits paid out if we don't meet our SLAs. And that involves needing to integrate all of the systems all the way across everything from the ticket system, the performance system, the logs, et cetera, and then bring that over to mapping the SLAs that we have and then adding them into adding credits directly into the billing system and automating credits and automating SLAs is actually a big win for the telco because if it's not automated, it's actually quite costly because there's a lot of hand evaluation hand work to figure out, hey, which system didn't meet the SLA? And then translating that and then putting it onto the bill. So automating that actually has a great return. And of course it also improves customer experience because customers feel, Hey, yeah, we don't have to tell you that your service was degraded. The customer knows it already, and wouldn't it be nice if they don't have to call us? We just say, Hey, we know that your service was degraded and here's your credit. So it's just all around a real benefit of doing the integration.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (24:01):
Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much everyone. Final question, and I'm going to come to all of you for response on this one and we have to talk about ai. How is the increased use of AI and especially gen ai, how is this going to affect the design and operation of next generation digital support systems? As I said, I'm going to come to all of you, but John, let me come and start with you first,

John Abraham, Appledore Research (24:26):
Right? Yeah, I think Gen ai, much of the focus for that right now from a telco standpoint is on improving the efficiency, be it of its own resources or processes or process flows and so on. And it is less about building a standalone system that can be handed over to the customer so that they can get their queries answered. So much of the focus is right now at least, and I think this may be common to many other industries as well as all about improving the efficiency. So what does that mean? Well, some examples which we especially saw at Mobile World Congress was examples like where a customer has got a bill that is quite higher than what is normal bills are, and he or she makes a call into the call center and the agen AI can actually give a custom option there saying, sir, if you are calling about something discrepancies with your bill, I can actually send you a message summarizing why the bill is higher than previous couple of months or something like that.

(25:33):
And all of this is done automatically, but where the magic happens is that the summary that gen AI can produce is quite detailed and it's almost as if a human is writing it down. So that's where gen AI can make a difference by reducing the traffic into the call center. Or let's say a agent is had a call with a customer and now he or she needs to summarize that conversation and Gene can actually do it for them. So there is a substantial amount of time saved there. Another example would be say as part of the sales process, someone is putting together a court that needs to be sent out to the customer, and there is the ability to actually add a lot of relevant, it's almost like a recommendation engine that tells you what needs to be added to that particular bundle. Now where, see, some of this actually used to be enabled in the past by ai.

(26:32):
We have heard of AI based recommendation agents, but where this actually has a difference is that it can complete that entire process, not just recommending what are the other components for the bundle, but also creating a contract, writing up the email, sending it off to the client, and maybe even providing stats on whether it was opened or not, how long the customer may have spent reading through it and so on. So there is a lot of value that can be had by actually improving the efficiency. Now I think the biggest challenge is actually going to be about retraining the Telco's own workforce. And I mentioned this earlier at the beginning of the session about how big a shift the culture shift is actually got to play in the successful adoption of next generation architecture. And this is another such example as for instance at mwc, something that I was surprised by was that I saw quite a few demos where the agent, in this case, the call center agent actually gets a chat chatbot like interface where he or she can key in any query about a call that they are having.

(27:44):
So there are no limitations. You can just key in and the system will give you a response. But in spite of being seasoned people who have been working in the call of the industry, many agents struggle to know what needs to be keyed. They don't know what should we ask. It's almost like giving a blank space to create your own query. So that's where we are seeing the importance of things like prompt engineering. And the reason why I call it out is because as we go deeper into adoption of gen AI in our operations, we are uncovering new problems that require specific answers. Prompt engineering was not even a phrase that we talked about much a year ago, but today it's become a big deal because it's about how do you help the agent or whoever that user is keying the right query so that they can get the right answer to that. Gen AI is quite a capable tool, but I don't think we have fully understood what exactly it is capable of, and much of that power is limited by the query we type in. So that's why prompt engineering is quite a big deal, and that's just one example. There are many others. So suffers to say that a big part of the successful absorption of gene AI tools will be tied to how quickly the workforce can be trained up to use these tools in itself.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:09):
Great. Thanks so much, John. As you say, you've got to get the system from Drake first. Thanks for those examples. Soumava, let's come across to you for your thoughts on how AI and Gen AI may influence the development of next generation digital support systems.

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (29:25):
Very happy to guy. So basically to just build on what John just said, let's take an example. We have all faced this issue. We might have been subscribed to a specific promotion and our promotion end date comes up. We are not notified, we might not be notified, or there might be an email, no notification comes in, no call comes in. Nowadays it might be different, but using gen ai, there can be a specific notification coming up, okay, your promotion is going to end, that means your billing is going to increase for the next cycle. You are aware of it. So that is one of an use case where gen AI is actually helping it. I wouldn't say it's a specific gen AI use case, but at the end of the day, it's a traditional AI use case where gen AI actually comes into the versus BSS picture.

(30:23):
And we have seen this in MWC this year. Think about network planning from a telco perspective, telco spends a lot understanding which hexagon I have to go and plan and build my next cell site on so that I can cater to my customers to its best effective way. What gene AI can do is gene AI can understand the entire network paradigm and understand the traffic pattern for that specific location and give specific input saying that, okay, this is the position, this is the hexagon that you need to tap to. And then if there are leases that needs to be signed, it can go one step further and create, like John said, create contracts in terms of lease management, in terms of creating hexagons and network plans, and also replicating across cell sites and provisioning it using the OSS BSS channel support systems. So it's an entire next generation system where AI will come in built without ai. I think that's the next architecture that is, it'll come in built with the platforms itself.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:44):
So Marva, that's great. Thanks very much for those insights. And Beth, we'll come across to you. How do you see AI playing out with NextGen support systems?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (31:54):
Well, I think I'm going to throw some cold water on the conversation because not that I'm against ai, in fact, actually there's going to be a new white paper coming out sponsored by the LF networking at the one summit in a couple weeks. So a little bit of a play for that, but it's early days and what we're seeing is Gen AI is still very definitely not to be trusted. So the hard work of testing the gen AI against real life outcomes, so we can say, oh yeah, we can trust that the gen AI has generated something that is actually usable and it isn't just fantasizing that hard work just really hasn't been done yet. We're seeing so much focus right now. It's peak hype cycle, but gen AI has a long way to go. And again, it's not that it's not useful, but I think that it's still, right now we're using it for natural language processing, for ticket correlation and those types of things, but for the more sophisticated uses, network planning on the fly, flexible network performance, it's just not there yet.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:36):
Thanks very much, Beth. Well, let's come back in a year's time and just see how far this has moved along and whether or not we're going to be surprised or not. I've learned so much today, but we must leave it there for now. I'm sure we will continue this debate during our live q and a show later. For now though, thanks all of you for taking part in our discussion. If you are watching this on day one of our digital support systems summit, then please send us your questions and we'll answer them in our live q and a show, which is coming up soon. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website, which is where you'll also find the q and a form and our poll question For now though, thanks for watching and goodbye.