Since the early days of mobile telecoms, BSS (business support systems) have been at the heart of an operator’s business. But as we all know telecoms is changing. Operators’ core revenue generator, mobile data, is getting cheaper and cheaper. In fact, several telecoms leaders have predicted that the retail price for mobile data could fall to zero in the next five years. Also the cost of delivering a byte of data in some market now exceeds the revenue earned from a byte of data. Sadly operators’ core revenues are falling and profitability is being cut.

This new reality is forcing an evolution in the market. Many operators are busy re-developing their businesses. They are becoming digital service providers. This means selling a wide range of digital services to their customers. These will cover everything from movies to sports to taxis and even electricity and banking. As well as changing their business, operators are changing the systems and processes that support and enable their business. They want increased efficiency, faster time to profit and reduced costs. Putting this in perspective – Operators need vendors who can supply technology and expertise at small fractions of the historic cost structures and are now challenging the conventional wisdom of buying from the super-vendors.  As well as reducing costs, BSS needs to enable operators to develop new revenues. They need to increase the speed at which they do business.

The traditional ways of developing and providing BSS will not support this. BSS vendors must change. Some vendors will be quicker to evolve than others. Some will go out of business. Others will seize the opportunities that this change is creating.

Openet is at the forefront of this change.

We will enable our customers to change and we will seize the opportunities that this change is bringing. Working in a fast changing market means that we need to be flexible enough to offer different deployment models to our customers. These include:

DevOps and Microservices: We are working with customers using DevOps to deliver agile solutions in a microservices environment. With our DevOps proven capability and our microservices modular software technology we can enable our customers manage their deployments more directly if they so choose to do so.

‘As a Service’: Also our  “as a service” bundled models (Managed Services models and/or pre-bundled service capsules) can provide complete, low risk and low price, simplified “ready to go” solutions.  

One-Off Solutions: We will also leverage our technology and expertise to offer “one off” solutions to solve specific problems for customers. These solutions may be small tactical ways to help customers with very simple problems or they may be larger technology challenges.

Our skill in working with customers to use software to deliver the best possible business value is well proven. Openet has always had an excellent reputation for developing innovative software. We will continue to lead in this regard.  We were the first vendor in the world to virtualize our policy and charging solutions. We are also delivering smaller solutions at a fraction of the time and cost of the traditional big BSS vendors. Using this agile approach we are enabling our customers to be more like the webscale companies, and less like the traditional phone company. 

Openet are more like Tesla than Ford, more like SpaceX than NASA. Our enablement capabilities and our expertise differentiate us from slower, high priced mega-vendors. Up until now, these over-priced, monolithic vendors were the conventionally wise choice to go to for a customer. Not any more. Openet allow our customers to have all the reliability and low risk aspects of a large vendor but avoid the vendor lock-in, commercial challenges and fixed capabilities that these vendors normally impose. Our track record at delivering solutions speaks for itself. We deliver “on-time” and “on-budget” and while we don’t always shout about it, in fact more than 96% of our projects are delivered in line with this promise.

The industry is undergoing a fundamental change. Systems and vendors need to evolve to support this transformation. New technology is removing the shackles of vendor lock in operators are now embracing proven alternatives who will deliver faster time to profit. This will provide the foundation for success in an ever changing market.