In January 2018, Openet announced a new approach to Digital BSS. Openet’s Digital Business Platform (DBP) is an open, API driven BSS stack. It contains Openet’s Digital BSS and systems from our partners. In less than a year, it has made some serious inroads in changing how BSS stacks are delivered and developed. In 2018, it’s gone live with some of most innovative operators in the world covering a range of services for digital first sub brands and MVNE / MVNO platforms.

It’s also won a few awards.

In October, Openet scooped the award for most innovative vendor in the telecoms market, at the World Communications award. The judges’ comments provided some insight in the reasons why:

“A state-of-the-art and highly innovative approach to the BSS issues being faced in digital transformation projects.”

“This architecture is a differentiator for Openet in a telco world in which monolithic, highly redundant and complex BSS/OSS systems are still predominant.”

Just one month later, Openet were picking up the award for OSS/BSS Innovation of the Year at the TelecomAsia Readers’ Choice and Innovation Awards. There’s been a common theme throughout all the plaudits that Openet’s Digital Business Platform has been receiving – innovation.

Innovation is well and good, but it needs to enable a change for the better in how telecoms operators do business and make money. There’s a reason why terms like ‘faster time to market and increased agility’ are at the top of every piece of marketing collateral from any BSS vendor. It’s because these are what operators want from BSS. But there’s a difference between sticking out some buzz words on a website and peddling the same old technology and processes in a new and shiny wrapper, and actually taking a new and radical approach to Digital BSS. One that delivers the agility that operators will increasingly need over the next few years. This is what we’ve done with DBP.

DBP is built on Openet’s Digital BSS products suite and by leveraging the Openet Digital API Gateway, we can easily integrate with 3rd parties such as content providers and payment portals. The Digital API Gateway also means faster integration with any legacy systems (if this is a requirement by the operator). By providing an open approach to BSS that runs on the cloud or in hybrid environments, we’re giving operators a choice.

In the recent Telecoms.com 2018 industry survey, 1500 telecoms professionals were asked ‘what was the main objective of digital transformation?’ Top answer with 33% of the vote was ‘faster product development and deployment’. No great surprise there as operators are looking to offer more attractive offers for existing services and develop new services, which could include everything from TV to Enterprise IoT, to financial services. There is also the need to be quick to try out new business models, such as ad funded and sponsored services, as well as looking at new pricing options, such as QoS and latency for 5G. Fast time to market isn’t just ‘a nice to have’ anymore. It needs to be baked into the design of any Digital BSS.

At the heart of DBP sits Openet’s Evolved Charging System (ECS). We recently implemented ECS as a real-time charging adjunct to a billing system for a tier 1 operator. One of the most impressive results was that the operator reported a 70% reduction in time to market. Another operator has also used ECS functionality to provide real-time contextual offer management. The result: a 28% uptake in offers. Using a new approach to Digital BSS delivers more than technology innovation – it can deliver game changing results.