Mobile operators today are in a rapidly moving market, continuously bringing new streams of opportunities to grasp and challenges to address. The approach to BSS (business support systems) – including billing, charging and policy – can determine how easy or challenging it would be for a mobile operator to respond to the market and maximize revenue opportunities. In fact, in a recent survey of over 100 operators,  85% acknowledged that market conditions require increasingly agile BSS systems enabling operators to gain business agility themselves, provide service diversity and faster time to market (“Operators’ BSS Strategies, telecoms.com, 2014).

Looking at four key attributes of business agility, over 70% of the operators surveyed pointed to specialist BSS vendors for the best solutions. Operators said that compared with BSS solutions from NEPs, specialist BSS vendors offered the best solutions in terms of service and pricing innovation (75%), time to market for new pricing models (72%), system flexibility (76%) and BSS virtualisation (72%).

Overall, this survey sought operators’ views on the most successful BSS strategies and assessed the strengths and weaknesses of specialist BSS vendors versus BSS solutions from network equipment vendors (NEPs). It highlights for instance that BSS from specialist BSS vendors will better prepare operators for market challenges than those from NEPs, according to the majority of operators. In a free text answer, one of the respondents said: “In a high speed data market, real time customer experience management would only be possible by a robust BSS which may be better delivered by specialists.”

 

To find out more about Operators’ BSS strategies, download the survey report