B/OSS Panel Has Its Head in the Clouds

A Team of IT and Back-Office Experts Get Their Bearings on Cloud Computing

The need for security, of course, doesn’t obviate the need for moving some things into the cloud, especially as carriers encourage flexibility to meet market demands brought on by, among other things, more competition.

“At Sprint we want to simplify and standardize the way we do business and also provide value to our sales, marketing and customer care teams,” Sieff said. “Cloud computing is a great fit for business processes that are currently housed in disparate applications such as Access and Excel which provide no visibility across the enterprise.”

Those applications now tend to be tightly controlled by sometimes covetous IT departments where the notion of cloud computing raises hackles. On the other hand, staff consolidation and an increased workload means IT must do more so it’s not a bad idea to offload some non-critical responsibilities.

“[Carriers] are trying to take it to the next level which is integrating heavy-duty OSS/BSS systems...with their billing systems. There are not a lot of companies out there that are trying to do that in the telecom space and this is creating some unique challenges,” O’Rourke said.

One area where that is very apparent is in the direct sales application where salesforce.com has become a force throughout the enterprise space and is moving into telecom.

Sprint enlisted salesforce.com because “we felt that this provided us the best value for our money and was the most efficient way to deploy and integrate into our other systems,” Sieff said. The impact on the BSS/OSS, he said, was immediately apparent, so the carrier could “find ways to share information to make our application more relevant and real-time for the users. We also have a lot of data available to us from these systems which we can give our sales teams to help in the area of customer satisfaction and retention.”

In all, the panelists agreed, it’s a good thing to have your head in the clouds.

“Cloud computing enables us to focus our in-house resources on our core competency which is what drives revenue in the end,” said Smith. “Standard services that don’t require much customization make the best candidates for the cloud: billing, ordering, up-selling, CRM, etc.”

In short, anything that can be ceded into the cloud should be ceded into the cloud.

“I see a lot of agreement on the panel,” O’Rourke said. “[However] the priorities are going to be different and the approach is going to vary.”

Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo
Wed., April 15
10 – 10:45 a.m.
Track Three: Defining, Measuring and Ensuring the Customer Experience
Transforming Your Business Through Cloud Computing

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