Clare McCarthy
Oracle OpenWorld: Oracle Communications Group
As vendor events go, Oracle's OpenWorld is one of the largest. Over 42,000 delegates descended on San Francisco in late September for a range of keynotes and sessions focused on industry verticals, including one for telecommunications. Oracle's Communications Group includes the OSS and BSS products that are core to its telco customers' IT transformations, and Oracle brought in over a dozen customer examples that demonstrated an improved customer experience and the business benefits that transformation has delivered.The simple life is best
The telecoms track comprised presentations on the IT transformation projects undertaken by telco customers such as AT&T, Bouygues Telecom, Brasil Telecom, BT, Cox Communications, France Telecom, KPN, Level 3, OTE, Telecom Italia, Telefonica Mexico, Vodacom, C&W and Verizon Wireless. The case studies supported three broad themes associated with telcos transforming technology-based structures into customer-centric businesses. These included:- simplification and automation - for example, enabling realtime self-care to enterprise customers for service provisioning or management of billing and content to consumers
- improving lead to cash (L2C) and trouble to resolve (TTR) processes
- introducing more software-oriented architectures and software-led services
- integration of multi-vendor environments.
Tangible business benefits for customers
Oracle did a good job of assembling customer references showing the gains they had made by rationalising and harmonising elements of their OSS/BSS and rolling out service delivery platforms. Whilst criticism has been levelled at Oracle in the past for its lack of expertise in the telco vertical, it seems to have leveraged Siebel, Portal, Metasolv and BEA acquisitions to good effect. In one example, a telco discussed the issues it faced four years ago with its ADSL provisioning. These included: the lack of visibility across provisioning of lines, distributed business logic and the absence of communication among the different systems and groups involved, bottlenecks at NOCs due to the high level of manual intervention in order and service management (OSM), and consequently inconsistent order delivery. The legacy system meant that it took 20 days to deliver an ADSL line and that it only activated 120 lines per week. After introducing automation of the OSM, service activation and inventory management, delivery took just seven days and it was activating 10,000 lines per week. “From six days to six minutes” put the metrics at the forefront for another tier 1 carrier, which discussed the issues it faces competing in the enterprise market. A mix of OSM, inventory management, IP service activation and CRM delivered results here, but the telco highlighted that getting the process right was equally important and described:- how it had worked in conjunction with the customer to remove the risk early
- the importance of agility in project management
- the need to work in short, iterative cycles.
