Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Welcome back to the Digital Support Systems Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage. And it's time now for our live q and a show. I'm Guy Daniels, and this is the second of two q and a shows. It's your final chance to ask questions on the future of OSS and BSS solutions for telcos and especially their integration with cloud services. Now, earlier today we held a panel discussion that looked at deploying NextGen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. We have already received a number of questions from you, some of which were held over from yesterday's show, but if you haven't yet sent one in, you still have time, just use the q and a form on the website. Well, let's now meet our guests who are going to help answer your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Amir Mehmood, director of Solution Engineering at Optiva and Andy Tiller, EVP for Member Products and Services at TM Forum. Hello, it's good to see you both again. Let's get straight to our first audience question because we've got a number of them to get through today. So our viewer asks is the long-term plan of telcos to bring together their siloed OSS and BSS platforms under one partner or hosted service. Andy, what are you seeing in your position at TM Forum? What are you seeing from telcos as what their longer term solutions are?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (02:10):
Well, in general, I would say no, that's not the strategy of most, certainly not of the larger operators. We've definitely seen some very big partnership announcements dating back five years or more. So I remember in 2019 that at and t and Microsoft announced a partnership where at t's IT workloads have been migrated onto Azure, for example. And we've seen many similar announcements since, but those are not exclusive by and large. I would say that all the bigger operators are working with all the hyperscalers and in various capacities, not so much just hedging their bets as taking advantage of the different capabilities that each of those partners provides. And so multi-cloud is very much the order of the day, I think.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:01):
Great. Thanks very much. Andy. Amir, what are your thoughts? I mean, the view obviously thinks, are we seeing a consolidation down to one partner, host the service or maybe it's a reduction in numbers?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (03:15):
So see, I agree with Andy to the part of multi-cloud is a reality and I've seen a lot of operators deploying their workloads on a range of cloud operators or cloud providers. But what I want to add here is that for the OSS and BSS vendor space, most tier two, tier three and MVNO operators, they are going for preintegrated solutions. There are still tier ones or group operators who have big armies and they want to develop their own things or they want to choose the best of breed solutions. They have big pockets. But I've seen that most operators, tier two, tier three especially, and MVNOs obviously, they are going for pre-integrated solutions, if not exactly just one vendor solution and hosted on the same cloud. And OSS and BSS sometimes requires specialties, which are with one of the vendors. So we have seen also the partnership model where a couple of vendors are leveraging each other's specialties. For example, Optiva has joined hands with an OSS player, GDI, they are experts in the geographical solutions and the network inventory and field force automation, et cetera. So a lot of times vendors or the RFPs are asking for pre-integrated solutions who have references of joint deployments and pre-integration. So I kind of agree with this statement that the long-term vision is, at least for the tier two, tier three and MBNO space is one vendor or a combination of multiple vendors preintegrated and deployed on hosted on a single platform.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:10):
Great. Thanks Amir. Because the question was talking about partners and hosted services, so we've covered both there, but Andy, I'd like to come back to you you'd like to pick up on some points.

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (05:23):
Yeah, I think the pendulum does swing backwards and forwards on best of breed versus fully pre-integrated or single vendor and has done for 20 years in our industry or more. But I think there are potentially advantages of both of either option, what the industry really needs, I think is easily integrated, best of breed, and still in our industry that integration is a challenge. And so preintegrated removes the risk of having to get new solutions together and make them work together. Of course, in TM forum, one of our primary missions really is to ease that integration challenge. So the work we're doing with the open digital architecture is really designed to create a composable IT ecosystem, plug and play software components which are very, very easy to integrate. So yes, I think Amir is right that we're not there yet as an industry. So the pre-integrated solutions are very attractive. But once you've built that, having the flexibility to swap pieces out rather than change huge chunks one at a time is something that I think certainly TM forum operator members are very keen to establish.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:41):
Great. Thanks very much, Andy. It's going to be interesting to see how these trends emerge and develop over the coming next couple of years. Right? Let's move on to our next question. This one's about use cases. We always get a use case question from our audience, and the question is, can you highlight a practical use case of OSS and BSS data integration in the public cloud and its impact on the customer experience? Amir, have you got a use case or two you could share with us?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (07:12):
Yeah, so I can surely talk about a couple of use cases. So firstly, in the area of customer support, unifying the BSS and OSS data provides insights into potential root causes. And it can also, even using AI and gen AI now it can preemptively take actions to avoid customer issues proactively doing the analysis of the network trends and taking actions that customers don't face the issues which are potentially their issues. And by combining the BSS and OSS, you have a bigger pool of data and you can of course do much more based on that data. Combined insights is a big thing and you can do some real time monitoring real time. And this links to my other use case, which is by doing this digital support systems, by unifying the OSS and BSS, we can significantly improve the customer experience talking about realtime network activation or service activation, realtime billing, realtime view of the customer's tickets, a single view of the customer's tickets. So not having to create, let's say multiple within the operator not having to create multiple tickets for OSS issues or BSS issues. All of these things are much easier when we have a unified OSS and BSS system.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:43):
Great. Thanks very much for sharing those use cases. Amir. Andy, did you want to come in on some extra observations here?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (08:52):
Yes. I mean, I think it's to say that public cloud is part of most operators strategy to use to a greater or lesser extent. So there are a very large number of use cases. I chaired a session at TM forum event last year where we had a representative from BT who've been very, very keen and announced publicly the strategy to migrate as much as possible to the public cloud that we also had Deutsche Telecom and we had Orange Poland and all of them were talking about different motivations for doing their transformation migration to public cloud. But generally I think what was coming across was the need to experiment and to work it out as you go along, particularly around the costs. So finops was a big topic. Once you've started to migrate your IT workloads or network workloads to the cloud, you then need to figure out what it takes to optimize the cost. And so it's a gradual process. It's not something that it's a one-time decision and then you put those use cases on the cloud and you're done.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:15):
Absolutely, Andy and DTW is certainly the place to be if you want to hear more use cases and up to the minute use cases, strongly recommend it. Next question from our viewers then. What are the main obstacles that are preventing operators from simplifying their BSS and OSS solutions, which in turn would lead to reduced spending and a better service for users? Amir, could I come across to you? What challenges are you seeing?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (10:46):
Yeah, sure. So I would say the foremost issue is the legacy architecture. The applications, the BSS and OSS applications are mostly customized and they have been in the operator landscape for like 5, 10, 15, 20 years. People are used to using it. So oftentimes when we talk about simplifying the BSS and OSS and unifying and migrating to public cloud, the organizational change management is required to basically create a strategy and then follow through and get the benefits people need to change their mindsets. A lot of time just lift and shift is not bringing the benefits so people can get frustrated. The real value of the public cloud or any cloud native architecture will be when all of your applications are running in a harmony and they are using the new architecture framework, they're using the TMF APIs, the ODA architecture, the streaming between the different applications, unified data models. So all of those things are key contributors, and if you don't follow it, that will become your preventing or the obstacles in the journey to the public cloud. Cost is another factor sometimes. So simplification does not come for free. You need to plan some upfront costs, which will eventually lead to the long-term cost saving and operational efficiencies. So I think these are the two main things. Yeah.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:29):
Great. Thanks very much, Amir. Why don't we go and check in on our poll before we get onto our next set of questions because we always run an audience poll with our summits. So why don't we see what the current state of voting is for our digital support systems summit? The question we've been asking you this week is what are the most important requirements for next generation digital support systems? And you can see the real time votes appearing to my right here and the trends are very similar to yesterday. Good to see a very strong showing there for the focus on service creation and revenues. That was choice number seven at the bottom, AI capabilities also showing strongly as is building and operating on cloud native software. Well, we're going to keep the polls open until the end of today, but no later than that. And then we will analyze the results on telecom tv.

(13:45)
Right. We still have time for more questions and there's a question that has just come in a few seconds ago and we're going to just jump straight into that one. If you don't mind, I'll surprise both of you because the question is about, and it relates to the survey we've been running and the audience poll, because the question is, how important is the integration of OSS and BSS to the success of Gen ai? Or maybe we can make that to AI in general really because it was the currently showing us that the second most important factor on our viewer polar. And any thoughts from either of you about how the integration of OSS and BSS fits in with the tremendous moves that have been made in AI at the moment and how that's going to play with telcos? Anyone comment on the AI situation? Andy, can you coment?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (14:44):
Yeah, I'll take that first if you like, guy. Well, I think fundamentally AI relies on data. So access to the data that's stored in those OSS and BSS systems is essential for AI based automation to really work effectively. And that's a challenge for a lot of telcos today clearly. So there is really a need to modernize data architecture, and that's a fundamental aspect of the transformation of legacy OSS and BSS towards more cloud native approach. The technologies are there, event streaming, semantic representation of data, these can all be built into the two B architectures in the transformation projects. Of course, data quality is an issue that has to be addressed as well. We've seen examples where TM Forum members have assumed their data was good and created some gen AI applications, which turned out to be not very helpful because the quality of the data that they trained it on was not really very good. So data quality is a separate issue and data privacy is a separate issue, but in terms of enabling the AI to work effectively, having the data accessible is a key part of the future architecture.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:13):
Great. Thanks very much Andy. And as you say, the quality of the data, data security and just getting data that maps with each other as well, that's come up several times during this summit. Amir, let's come across to you and your thoughts about building O-S-S-B-S-S around AI capabilities and what that means for especially gen ai.

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (16:34):
So specifically talking based on my experience. So we came up with a gen AI based application for plan optimization and plan creation. Now, gen AI had two angles. One is the data on which you are training the AI model, and as Andy suggested, of course, we need to unify the data and we need to feed the OSS and BSS data in a standardized way, in a structured way, which can be consumed by the gen AI model to come up with the best offering or to come up with the next best, let's say, suggestion to the customer or even let's say provision services provision, let's say network services and do some optimization kind of actions. So for example, if there is an outage going on, provision more resources in the surrounding areas because there may be some higher traffic or underutilized areas can be routed to a different area. So these are different possibilities and unifying this under one system, which is let's say visible to the gen ai, we will basically open a lot of our possibilities.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (17:53):
Great. Thanks very much Amir. This is absolutely fascinating. Let's see what happens over the next 12 months or even less. We still have time for more questions. So here's our next one. From the audience who will be the first to achieve the new DSS digital support systems architecture. Will it be large or small telcos? Will it be greenfield or brownfield telcos, and which types of partners are best placed to help them and do any thoughts from you and your members?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (18:27):
Yeah, there's no simple answer to this one I think, but clearly a greenfield operator has an advantage, at least for a while because they can build their network and their IT systems using the latest technology. So geo in India is a very good example of a TM forum member that has built a cloud native network and cloud native IT systems that enabled them to really be very, very successful. That advantage lasts for a while until their technologies begin to date. So that's only a temporary advantage, but it certainly can give you a really good headstart at the beginning, large or small, that depends really. I mean the larger operators tend to have more resources, for instance, more capability to bring in-house, the expertise and skills in new technologies, software developers, AI skills. You tend to find these more in the larger operator groups. Smaller operators on the other hand, can sometimes be more nimble and get things done quickly. Often you'll find that a larger operator will try new things in one of their smaller opcos. So potentially if you're a smaller operator you haven't lost, you can take advantage of your flexibility to make decisions quickly and move forward with new technologies faster.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:54):
Good to hear. Thanks very much, Andy. So yeah, depends on the telco. Great. Let's move on because there's another question that we have received today. Now the question is, the topic of mergers was briefly mentioned yesterday by one of the guests. Yes, it was. What has been the impact of mergers and acquisitions of both telcos and vendors on OSS and BSS development? Have they just added to the complexity? Good question. Andy, can we come across to you first and then perhaps Amir we can come to you?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (20:31):
Yeah, we continually see mergers and acquisitions taking place both on the operator side and also on the vendor side of course. So on the operator side, I would say that whenever there is a merger, you end up with the potential to reduce cost by consolidating the systems and of course to improve customer experience because you want a single view of the customer you want to remove or reduce the number of IT systems that are being used. And there's an opportunity there to design a new architecture to rationalize, consolidate, bring in new technologies, bring in new partners potentially. And that's continuously happening. I've myself worked on projects where in the middle of a project, a merger and acquisition has happened. One of the partners or one of the opcos that we were working with now belongs to another company. So it can be very, very disruptive in the real world, but it is also a motivator for change. It provides an instant business case. You've just got to do it. So I would say overall it it's a fact of life and can be very positive.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (21:43):
Thanks very much, Andy. Amir, what are your thoughts on mergers and acquisitions? And I guess especially from the vendor perspective?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (21:50):
I think m and a is an opportunity for everybody. Speaking based on my own experience within optiva, Optiva has gone through a lot of mergers and acquisitions and it helped optiva, and this is a fact that we have unified our architectures and our portfolio. We have taken the best pieces of the different acquisitions, and finally we have a much better final product, which we are able to offer as a pre-integrated modular stack. So I'm sure even on the operator side, when merger and acquisition happens, there is a lot of opportunity to simplify and to keep the best pieces and to streamline the processes across different organizations. So it's always an opportunity. I think there is no, it is complexity, but that at the end of the complexity there is a big opportunity.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (22:52):
Great. Thanks very much, Amir. So yes, it's complex, but there's opportunities here. It's not negative, all negative. There's positives here as well. Great. Well thanks both of you for those answers. Let's see what else we've got here from the audience. Here's one, what are the best ways to drive innovation in BSS and help deliver efficient new digital support systems? Big wide question there. Andy, do you want to take a stab at that first?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (23:23):
Yeah, I'm going to make a shameless plug for the TM Forum Catalyst program as one way that we really see the industry driving innovation. Catalyst projects are where TM four members come together and they build a proof of concept for some common business challenge that the industry has show how new technologies be applied to solve complex challenges. And it works very nicely because you bring operators and system integrators and software solution providers and consultancies together in a common project where everybody just rolls up their sleeves and gets to work. It's a way to share the cost of that innovation to share the r and d dollars across a wider group. And then the industry presents those at showcase events. And so you can wander around and you can see what others have done. You can go into quite a lot of technical detail about how the solution was created. So we find this as a very important way that forum members work together to innovate together and co-create. So shameless plug, admittedly, but please join TM Forum, join the catalyst project. It's a great way to innovate.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (24:46):
We're fine with shameless plugs on telecom tv. Don't you worry. Thanks Andy. Amir, it's a big question, innovation, how to innovate, how to do better. What are your thoughts?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (24:57):
So I would like to step back a little bit. Innovation at a grassroots level means that you don't have to wait and bringing new pieces of software or new pieces or the new enablers to basically launch new services, you're easily rolling out those changes and so on. So I think the first and the foremost is adapt the new cloud native architecture. If you are running your BSS systems on a legacy architecture where you had to pay hundreds of thousands for a CR and you were doing every four or five years a major upgrade and a hardware replacement project, that does not mean innovation. When you are on the cloud native architecture and when you are following the CICD updates, you can continuously get new features and new CRS delivered in a much easier way, in a much cost-effective way. I think that will bring efficiencies in delivery cycles and bring innovations. Of course, rightly said by Andy, the industry forums like TM Forum, catalyst programs, these are all contributors, but the way vendors are software developers are delivering those innovations to the operators on the architecture wise and on the delivery methodology wise using the CICD, et cetera. These are equally important as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (26:26):
Great. Thanks very much, Amir. Well, I think we've got time to squeeze in a couple of quick questions that have just come in in the past 10 minutes. So thanks very much everyone for sending in these questions. We do appreciate it. And there's a question here, Andy, I think I may put you on the spot and come to you first on this one. You may or may not agree with the premise of the question, but let me read it out nice and clearly. Why are many operators who are embarking in digital transformation still looking to keep all their existing processes, products, and models? Does this mindset need to change? Andy, is that a statement you agree or disagree with?

Andy Tiller, TM Forum (27:11):
Well, I've definitely seen it, yes. So the best of intentions at the start of a project can be to focus on new business value creation, to focus on enhancing customer experience, obviously reducing cost. These are the drivers. But what can quite often happen when you get down to the working practices is that the existing systems are supporting real business as usual. And so it's often a question of risking, sacrificing existing revenues by cutting services, radically simplifying the offerings and so on. So you always have that dilemma when migrating to a new transformed to be architecture. How much of the existing products, services, customers and so on are you going to migrate over? And the operational people have to deal with that on a daily basis. So the pressure comes from them to make sure that don't launch these new systems until they can do everything that I need today.

(28:17)
So it requires a very radical approach to deciding what you're going to risk. And I think often our industry is a little bit risk averse, and so the tendency is to risk very little and not be quite radical enough in terms of simplification. Can you take a bet on being able to migrate these legacy customers onto new services, give them incentives to do it? You are really spending a lot of money quite often in preserving legacy systems or transferring complex legacy processes into a new system to support a small number of customers that's not profitable. I think being brave on that is the secret to avoiding this.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:09):
Great. Thanks very much, Andy. Appreciate those comments and insights. That's great. Well, we've covered a wide range of questions on this q and a show. I think we could just squeeze in one quick final question, one quick final comment, hopefully, Amir, let me hopefully put this towards you. And this is a question about cloud providers in latency. We've had a couple on the subject of latency over this past couple of days. DSS on public cloud is a good idea, says our viewer. But are there steps being taken by public cloud providers to reduce latency from the operator's core network to the DSS that's running on the public cloud without that being taken care of, any migration to the public cloud would not be successful. Amir, any thoughts on that issue?

Amir Mehmood, Optiva (29:59):
Yeah, so first of all, this is a relative discussion. Depends on which region are you talking about and what kind of cloud is available in that region. Speaking based on my experience, Optiva was one of the first vendors to put a real time charging OCS solution on a public cloud in a customer in Europe. And we were connected to their core network, which was, so this customer was a global MVNO and their core network partners were in different regions. They were actually in North America and in Asia as well. So we had done the real time charging, which is the most latency sensitive issue. So I think latency is a challenge, but it depends on the kind of services that you're trying to do. For many IT or OSS applications, a lot of times they're not even latency sensitive. Real-time charging and 5G ultra low latency kind of use cases are latency sensitive.

(31:07)
And that's where you need to consider the public cloud region proximity with your core network. And my experience also says that often the public cloud hyperscaler, like Google, Microsoft AWS, they are not the providers of the interconnect. So there are a lot of interconnect providers. We were doing a lot of surveys or queries to these interconnect providers on the behalf of our customers in many cases. So these interconnect providers, they have their own fiber, they can lease fiber and they can offer good connectivity, which is sufficient for running latency. So for example, our real-time charging, for example, requires 40 to 50 millisecond round trip latency. And this is not really unusual talking about, let's say Europe, north America, Asia, maybe Africa is a little bit exception right now, but I think between Middle East, Europe, north America, surely and some parts of let's say Asia, they're very well connected. There's no problem.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (32:25):
Great advice and good answer. Great advice there. Amir. Thank you very much for that. Well, we have reached the end of our program, so thank you both very much indeed for joining us on this live program. And that is a wrap for this year's Digital Support Systems Summit. Thank you to all of you who submitted questions. We got a lot of questions this year. We tried to cover the most representative ones in the limited time available to us. And if you missed any of our programs featuring all of these industry experts, then you can watch them on demand from our website. We will be back next month for our long running open run summit as our DSP leaders coverage continues. But until then, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.