OSS/BSS doesn’t exactly send a thrill through most audiences.
“The three words that really put fear in the heart of people in Silicon Valley are ‘telco billing software.’ Tediously boring,” Mark Sherman of Telstra Ventures joked at the recent Telecom Council Carrier Connections event.
But Sherman, who is managing director for Telstra Ventures, went on to tell his audience that a major evolution is underway in OSS/BSS and billing systems.
“I fundamentally believe in the next five years, every telco in the room will replace their core, heart-and-lung billing systems,” he added.
In Telstra’s case, he said, three years ago, 26% of its support interactions were through digital channels. Last year, it was 44%, and Sherman said in three years he expects that figure to be 80%.
“The reality is that some of our existing systems have smoke coming out of their ears, and they’re whining and sniveling,” Sherman said.
Sherman said that billing is an operator’s second most important system, after its network — and that since telco OSS/BSS systems have historically been oriented toward calculating voice minutes on a monthly basis, they’re not up to the task of the handling the type of plans and offers that Telstra sees as the future: mixing core data services with third-party media and information and packaging content, data, and apps in bundles, as well as handling the huge scale of data transactions.
“Mobile data is exploding. There’s the emergence of real-time, in-memory databases that can actually handle the transaction volume of this explosion. But what we really needed is a core, heart-and-lung system that could help manage the dynamics of that explosion in a real-time, well-concerted way,” Sherman said.
Telstra found its solution in Matrixx Software, and the company’s founder and VP of marketing, Jennifer Kyriakakis, shares insights on the company’s approach in the following case study presentation from the Telecom Council Carrier Connections event. Telstra Ventures led Matrixx’s latest funding round “with the objective of accelerating the expansion of Matrixx’s operations while potentially driving strategic synergies for Telstra and Telstra business units,” according to a joint statement at the time of the investment.
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