Legacy IN providers are under pressure to support virtualisation. Proprietary hardware and operating systems will only solidify the challenge they face. True business agility will not be realised when the lowest common denominator is a large stack of proprietary kit.

Enter the virtualised OCS and everything can change in three straightforward steps:

Step 1:

Take all your legacy price plans and make the following decision: do I keep them on the old system or migrate them to the new. In any case, you want to isolate them as they are an anchor to your future business. Deploying them in a dedicated system will mean you test once, deploy once, then you turn the key and lock it down. Barring regulation changes, you are not going to be touching these price plans again. If you have it virtualised in an elastically scalable OCS, you can reduce the resources as you get subscribers migrated off to new price plans.

Step 2: 

Take all your current plans and deploy on a dedicated virtualised OCS. This is where the changes will take place. Having an NFV based OCS will allow you to roll out changes, whether they be configuration, patches or upgrades, quickly, easily and all in service. Remember testing is only as much effort as it needs to be because you isolated all your legacy baggage in step 1.

Step 3:

Create an environment for your MVNOs and Enterprise Customers. Again isolation is the key to success. No single virtual OCS instance is more complex than it needs to be and the specific needs of your MVNOs and enterprise customers will not introduce undue complexity to your core OCS.  

Your virtualised Elastically scalable OCS is the key to your future success. It’s your cost effective sandbox for new ideas and the best part is that if they succeed, there’s no big migration exercise, you just scale up to meet the needs in your NFV environment.