The changing landscape of Digital OSS in the 5G era!

In the past couple of years, the advent of 5G has been quite a dominant force across markets and most operators globally are moving toward this technology as fast as possible. This is a primary trend, which is prominent across markets as operators are convinced about the opportunities it brings to the table with regards to network and services modernization, and it also indirectly facilitates and accelerates the journey of telco to tech-co transformation journey. OSS as a domain has always been a network-centric one, and its proximity to the physical infrastructure demands a different mindset when it comes to understanding its core functioning.

We have also moved away as an industry from being a network connectivity-centric organization toward being heavily customer-focused and obsessed leading us to be service-centric. This mindset over the past decade or so has led to a complete digitization of BSS, and hence the focus from 3G to 4G has always been on customer experience and value management through multiple customer touch points and omni-channel transformation. In short, BSS did steal the show until 2019 when 5G started being a dominant force enabling network enabled transformation. OSS always existed and was critical but it was very well aligned as per traditional aspects of the operational life cycle within a telco. This of course started from support and readiness followed by fulfilment and assurance journeys.

To complement this rapid pace of development with 5G, the majority transformation now will happen in the OSS front where network will be driven by SDNs and virtualization and so will be the services riding on top. The much developed verticalized siloed OSS stacks will be challenged, and the thinking needs to be radical enough to drive multiple aspects of automation and complex orchestration of services. These services are often bundled and importantly need to comply with complex business processes within the service delivery value chain; hence, the need for orchestration arises and becomes super important. As much as network is emulating the IT side of the story, in adapting open architectures, which are driven by open APIs, this will become an even more critical and important factor for the long-term success and sustenance of OSS as a stand-alone domain.

Most OSS systems are also basing themselves in being analytically driven, to be part of the OLAP world rather than being traditionally OLTP. To drive this change or operational need and make OSS look more strategic to business, one needs to be able to correlate any critical data within the underlying OSS systems with anything else. The importance of data lineage and traceability hence becomes super important, and not just that, to be able to track and trace it in an automated fashion without compromising on data integrity helps to really ensure best practices of data quality adoption are being implemented at the grassroots level of any OSS operation to make it data-driven and thus decision making happens rapidly and without ambiguity, which is empowered by data – the lowest common denominator.

People in the modern day and age with respect to 5G and its allied eco-systems often use the word common data fabric and its establishment within the OSS systems. This is the need of the hour and is again an important driver to showcase e2e data governance. However, achieving it within the age-old OSS landscape is a phenomenal challenge, especially with systems aligned toward a verticalized OSS stack. Hence, there must be a logical mapping of horizontalized OSS functions to complement the above aspects mentioned, as operators will be severely reluctant to make fresh investments and re-engineer the complete domain. There is business as well as operational dependency, which will be riding of critical importance and with a demand of uncompromised QoS.

Digital OSS is the need of the hour as more networks are moving toward adaptation of 5G either in the RAN or the core, the prominence of Open or virtualized network infrastructure driving changes to a standard network environment, thus all services riding on top are purely a function and formation of the Open API construct to drive faster monetization of the network or NaaS – network as a service. Most OEMs have also realized this now and are launching complimentary OSS offerings to drive network services in complimentary to their other network standard offerings.

The horizontalized OSS stack often starts with the OSS production systems trying to establish this common data fabric by imbibing various layers of automation by tracking and tracing on demand data within various OSS systems. This forms the base within a digital OSS stack. It then leads to various types of OSS products, which can be accessed by a central catalogue, often referred to as OSS data catalogue, facilitated by the layers of automation in the production environment to expedite the need for on-demand data. Each of these services is further exposed by the service management layer on top, which is driven by a set of SMO solutions, as in the case of most 5G OSS service delivery. The SMO layer leads on to the network APIs, which get orchestrated in a seamless fashion in line with all the other traditional OSS functions. The network API layer is thus quite complex to drive all aspects of 5G and its detailed portfolio for any telco. Hence, even if the telcos are not looking for radical transformation as most being brownfield Tier-I operation, they still must compliment and remain unhinged toward investing in each of these horizontalized layers of data unification, automation, and orchestration to compliment all functional aspects much needed for 5G.

With 5G being successful and highly commercialized at scale for the enterprise or consumer, the focus on OSS and its transformation will be the key to drive overall QoS of services and increase NPS scores within operators who are otherwise looking to struggle to make any profitability over the past few years. This will always be a great transformational change within the telco operator and of course a mindset shift, which needs to be brought in for the greater good and to make 5G a true success story!

This article is authored by Niladri Shekhar Dutta, BCC & IIT Advisory Committee member & ICT Industry Personnel. Views expressed are personal.