Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Thursday, February 16, 2017

IoT reconfigures BSS systems due to new partners and need to ensure quality of experience

The number of connections promised by the Internet of Things is just the beginning of the changes that the operator needs to address in their OSS and BSS systems. The use of data captured by sensors, machines and other devices, the conciliation with new players in the ecosystem and the guarantee of QoE will generate the true impact on asset management, procurement, billing and other processes.

Becoming an Internet of Things (IoT) Player is essentially a digital transformation for the telecom operator. Among the various adaptations recommended day after day to  the telcos, the OSS/BSS systems (to a greater extent, the BSS) are obliged to evolve in three senses, as indicated to Convergencialatina from companies being providers of the segment.

Firstly, opening up to a broader ecosystem, of players linked to specific verticals and application and service providers from other industries, makes reconciliation among parties to become complex. Ari Banerjee, Strategy senior director at Netcracker, emphasized that in the "partner-centric" model - which is the one to be adopted as a new paradigm - "price changes in this type of business can be endless". He noted that "procurement systems, catalogs, must evolve, be agile, and need to integrate, besides considering different partners. Here is the transformation".

From the Polish company Comarch it was warned that currently operators lack formal solutions to handle the reconciliation among different participants of the IoT business. That is why they are offering in the Latin American market a specific module for IoT, which at the moment of generating a sale, immediately divides the amounts among the parties, simplifies the operator's inward operation, evaluates results and makes immediate measurements.

María Victoria Escudero, Sales Director for Latin America at Comarch, said that this module has not yet been implemented in the region. "Telekom Austria did so, for transportation, logistics, Smart home and health services. In Latin America, development of IoT still requires a more stable infrastructure and automation instances are missing so as to make it profitable. In addition, the operator's strategic definitions should be given (for example, Avantel in Colombia has a specific administration of IoT because it wants to be in the business) and that the market reaches a certain maturity: user in Latin America still does not trust that the telecommunications operator may give it other services beyond communication", said Escudero.

The Comarch module manages the collection among the different parties involved (providers of applications and services that join the value chain); it enables different charging schemes, with adaptive service on demand plans (for example, for one connection, one plan per month may be needed, and for other one, other frequency may be required); it displays each access; establishes a quality of service scheme not comparable with traditional telecommunications; and allows multiple currencies, among other features.

Supportting OEMs

In the coming years, OSS/BSS systems will have to adapt to the reconfiguration of the IoT business, now focused on an "Enterprise" market, as Amdocs calls it, but next to evolving towards a "Servitization" market. Shahar Yaacobi, the company's IoT Marketing Manager, explained that "currently, 95% of IoT connections globally correspond to the Enterprise market. That is, accesses that companies use internally, for maintenance, to cover their own needs, to reduce costs". But he believes that the Servitization market will grow, with firms that will begin to understand the value of connectivity and want to offer it to their users. For example, Nike uses M2M to "track" their machines, but will begin to go further in order to create services relevant to the user. This is the change in OEMs: "to use M2M for their own needs, to become service providers, and to strengthen the relationship with the user."

The evolution of the OEM will not be possible without the support of the telecommunications operator, creating a new partnership that will force to evolve the OSS/BSS system  (only AT&T and Vodafone are currenly located in this second phase). "The operator in the Enterprise market maintains a simple vendor role of connectivity under a wholesale mode. In the Servitization, the operator can bring its internal assets and work together with the OEMs, but its platforms must adapt to an unprecedented number of new players that join its connectivity; A time-to-market of new services that must be very fast; a huge number of SIM cards; billing systems "as a service", said Yaacobi.

In this sense, Amdocs offers its "IoT services Enablement Platform", whereby the operator can approach the OEM to offer connectivity, activation in the network, billing and global marketing.

Data and predictive analytics

Along with the new players and the complexity of sharing revenues and costs, the wealth of data obtained from IoT accesses implies their own impacts on the operator's OSS/BSS. Hitachi Data Systems distinguishes between IT and OT, this last abbreviation referring to operative technology (data of sensors or registers). On being these data integrated with the IT platform, a more complete understanding of events or processes is possible. Alexander Charry, Solution Consultant Manager of the firm, considered that the handling of a greater number of connections is a task that the operator can solve without major problems. "In the IoT business, the difference is that the operator sells it as a service. The biggest challenge is to store and protect the information generated by these devices, so as to then enter the predictive analytical phase".

Analytics tools must be able to "ingest" data from various sources, both structured and unstructured, and enable searching on public and private clouds and on mobile devices.

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