Telecom IQ

One of the trends we are seeing in our customer base of Communications Service Providers today is the demand for full solution support for the telecoms solutions we sell.   Traditional support services, what we call “Reactive Services” are important, but now, equally important are services covering the full solution and thinking proactively (ahead of problems) as well as “out-tasking” parts of maintaining a solution.

Take the case of LiaoNing Mobile.    A part of China Mobile, Liaoning Mobile Communication Co. Ltd.’s major operations include mobile communications, transmission and data communications covering about 10 million subscribers.

To operate their complex multivendor network, LiaoNing Mobile has chosen tools from HP Operations Support Systems Transformation and services from HP to implement and maintain this solution. They have selected the “Solution Total Support” which provides a single point of contact who owns the incident until it is resolved.  This total solution support includes the support of all components such as HP products, HP integration and third party parts, following a “one neck to choke” services concept.

  For more information, you can see the HP Solution Management Services experience from Liaoning mobile:

 http://h20208.www2.hp.com/cms/services/sms.htm

Providing the appropriate Service Level Objectives to support the solution depending on its level of criticality is essential. Most of our telecom solutions have 24x7 Telecom support with 30 response time for critical calls– which is what we find our customers want for mission critical solutions.  But as we move into the more sophisticated kinds of support service our customers are increasing asking for a proven track record. They are asking us for metrics, statistics and quality measurement tools giving the evidence of results and performance reached versus service level objectives in our contracts.

A high priority objective for Operators is to increase the solution value and the end user satisfaction.  The “proactive”, predictive  and pre emptive services like health check, capacity check, path check, solution monitoring, or solution reporting allow first to identify when and why the incidents occur,  then to anticipate potential future issues,  finally take the corrective actions before they may occur and ensure they do not occur again. These short-term services have a straight-forward RoIe as they improve the customer operations efficiency and reduce the total cost of support .

Gartner has illustrated  this TCO benefits in their Publication of the 16 February  2010 : “Philip Crosby (the renowned American Quality Management guru) advocated in the 1950s that the cost of quality, that is, the costs associated with not doing the job right the first time, were typically in the region of 20% to 25% of sales revenue. For every dollar paid to a vendor for support, another 2.5 or more are likely to be spent internally on support-related activities or the consequences of support failure.  So, the benefits of reducing the total cost of support are clear.”

Another category of services is expanding fast: what we call “operational services” including Back-up Management, Call flow Management or Capacity Management. These services are used by operators to maintain solution optimization while devoting their internal staff to core tasks.   For example, a company like Liaoning Mobile should ask themselves “Which elements of the solution operations will be best performed by my organization vs. my supplier?”  This is an opportunity for suppliers to define and develop new management services to out-tasking the operator activities. For sure, operators will be looking more and more for total solution optimization at reduced total cost of ownership.

This cost reduction can represent up to 20% operating cost savings for operators compared with operators in-house alternative .

Certainly, the priority of many operators is to launch new services and expand their solution.  Liaoning, like an increasing number of other Operators, has decided to work with a supplier able to continue to enhance its solution in order to adapt to its evolving business needs. The new “enhancement services” provide plans and guidance to evolve the solution towards new business requirements.  These services provide the advantage to augment staff, and bring outside expertise to the operator organization,  as an example they cover : solution audit, law enforcement reporting, solution consulting, architecture review consulting.  As Liaoning described  in the video below : “We need the system to be more flexible and progress on demand. Easy to maintain, easy to manage. So we need HP software support services. And still more powerful, more flexible support services. I think HP can help us get better and better.”

Solution Management Services

For more information, you can see the HP Solution Management Services added value description from HP management and Liaoning:

YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/user/HewlettPackardVideos?feature=mhee#p/u/0/VHMxAKrlV50

Do you also need more services to optimize and enhance your solution  ?

Please share with us your experience on recent support services.

In a previous blog, I discussed how a comprehensive, end-to-end OSS transformation program will bring tangible value to end customers. A key component in ensuring superior customer experience is naturally assuring the delivery and quality of the services the customers subscribe and pay for. After some hesitation in the service assurance market for a couple of years, there are signs of an increasing importance of SA, demonstrated by its investment priority in Communication Service Provides (CSPs).

In the recent report by B /OSS World “Service Assurance Moves Up the Priority Ladder”, 68% of respondents said service assurance was a high priority, while a full third indicated it as their highest priority.

This trend is also validated by a large number of new SA customer projects we have won in HP recently. These service providers tell us they see several opportunities from transforming their operations and investing in new SA solutions, such as:

• Compete more efficiently by transforming the OSS to gain agility, improved customer focus and reduced costs
• Reduce churn and meet growing customers expectations by understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience. For example, at DTAC, Thailand: “dtac introduces dSmart solution to improve customer experience”
• Fully realize the benefits from new technologies, and M&A, by removing inefficiencies through consolidation and automation of operational processes. For example, at Sasktel, Canada:  “SaskTel does it right with new resource management platform”
• Meet the challenge of complexity and diversity of devices, services and networks by consolidating management across telecom, IT, and IP. For example, at UNE, Colombia: "HP Helps Colombia’s UNE Improve Service Quality for Telecom Customers"
• Take advantage of new business models (e.g. Clouds, xaaS) with solutions meeting new operations requirements, such as massively scalable, full life-cycle SLA management

Further, it’s interesting to note that the majority of the respondents in B /OSS World’s report share our vision of the type of SA model they see as ideal: A customer centric approach (45%), or a combination of customer-centric and network-centric (49%). Further, only 1/10 of the respondents plan to maintain separate SA silos, using some sort of analytics engine to manage correlation, while 60% share our view that the most efficient SA solution is one that consolidates operational silos across processes, tools, and organizations. It might be that the ones in favor of silos see the scope of SA differently, and don’t consider correlation to be part of it, which would explain the divergent views.

We also believe that successful SA requires understanding and visibility of how services are used down to the individual user, according to multiple dimensions (including individual and groups of users, handsets being used, generated traffic, regional aspects, and network generation) to be able to deliver improved customer experience and better customer support. Again, this is backed up by the B/OSS World report, where a large part of the respondents say they lack visibility of customer experience and of performance of converged services.

Another challenge is often the lack of internal skills to engage in the required OSS transformation. From our own study last year “HP Global Business Transformation in Telecoms Study” together with Frost & Sullivan, where more than 30 CSPs were interviewed, the respondents said that the key success factors when choosing transformation partner were: Proven transformation experience, telecom as well as IT expertise, an end-to-end life-cycle and governance capability, and the ability to choose from a comprehensive OSS software portfolio. Watch the video “Surviving and thriving transformation”.

At the end of the day, what counts are tangible business outcomes. In the B/OSS World’s report, 42% say their SA solution has helped them improve the customer experience and reduce churn. In HP, our customers have been able to realize important business benefits after implementing our SA solutions. Some examples:

• $1B return via operations center consolidation (Large American operator)
• Reduced time required for incident isolation by 60-70% (Softbank, Japan)
• Resolve 70%+ of issues in first call (DTAC, Thailand: see link above)

Read more about how our OSS solutions can help CSPs increase agility, improve customer focus and reduce costs www.hp.com/go/oss