The BSS/OSS industry is witnessing explosive growth, and the various segments contributing to that are mobility and broadband, and the prepaid segment, coupled with the evolving richer content services and applications. The other significant developments changing the telecom landscape are strong competition and entry of new players.

Convergence has enabled the embracement of technologies, with WiMax, to deliver services over increased bandwidths, IPTV to provide quad play services, and launch of DTH services for the masses. The CAGR of the global OSS/BSS industry in the past five years has ranged between 6-7%.

The OSS/BSS market in India is growing much faster than the global market, and stands at Rs 5,500 crore in FY 2007-08.

Key Trends
The competition is further intensifying with service providers continuously rolling-out new services and making huge investments toward new technologies, and expanding their networks for growth and stability. Branding innovations and marketing efforts to retain the wallet-share of their customers, maximizing ARPU, and fighting competition are the areas that companies are working on. Also, telecom service providers are investing heavily on their back-office infrastructure to support convergent next-generation services.

The growth rate for the industry has doubled in the areas of revenue assurance, fraud management, CRM, and order management. The advent of new technologies and standards, IMS, IPTV, SOA, and SDP architectures (SOAs), have further accelerated the growth.

Another trend picking up steam is fraud management. International roaming fraud is a growing concern that drastically affects the profitability of mobile operators. According to a recent GSMA survey of thirty-seven operators, significant roaming fraud losses affect networks of all sizes across regions. Currently, operators rely on a high usage report (HUR) for alerts on possible fraud instances. The HUR framework requires a CDR detailing roaming service usage between the visited and home operator networks within a 36-hour window. However, in many instances, records arrive too late to prevent the fraud, resulting in revenue losses.

Roaming fraud has become such a concern for operators that the GSM Association (GSMA) has developed and mandated a new set of fraud detection standards for its operator members. The near real time roaming data exchange (NRTDRE) initiative has been developed in specific response to international revenue share fraud (IRSF), which thrives on the clone-and-sell technique.

With GSMA's introduction of NRTDRE as a replacement for HUR, the visited network must forward CDRs to the customer's home operator within four hours of the call-end time, to enable near-real-time detection of frauds committed by subscribers roaming on other networks.

The Players
Intec has enhanced its convergent billing product, SingleView, implemented at MTNL and Reliance in India. MTNL is focusing on widening the cellular and CDMA-based WLL customer base by introducing 3G services and IPTV. The company's business stands at Rs 50 crore this year.

HP has done quite an impressive business this year in India. Its OSS/BSS business contributed Rs 320 crore to its total revenue. The Rs 400 crore BSNL order for deployment of OSS and fraud management was the biggest order for HP in the last fiscal. HP will undertake the deployment along with TCS and HCL. HP's major customers include Bharti, BSNL, BPL, and Reliance. This year HP's NeoView product drew a lot of attention among telcos.

Suntec, an Indian company focused on the international market, has key clients in India like BSNL, MTNL, VSNL, and HFCL. This year, the company hasn't got any big orders. But there are a number of contracts in the pipeline which will bear fruits in the next financial year. Some of the prospective customers of Suntec include one of India's largest ISPs, an MSO, and another project in Nepal. Last year, the company's revenue stood at Rs 80 crore.

Clarity, a company specializing in next generation OSS solutions, signed a deal with BSNL to offer a highly scaleable OSS solution in the form of inventory management, provisioning, and fault management, for support of all voice services.

Ahmedabad-based Elitecore also received some good contracts from India's leading telecom service providers. It bagged orders from MTNL, Aksh Optifibre, BSNL, and Spice. The company's revenue stood at around Rs 45 crore compared to Rs 31 crore in the last fiscal.

Xalted delivered a convergent solution to MTNL which included seven key areas of inventory management, trouble ticketing, order management, service activation, revenue assurance, mediation, and inter-operator settlement.

Simultaneously, through Xalted's service provisioning platform, MTNL benefits from a unified view of subscriber bookings provisioned into the network. Beginning this fiscal, Xalted also received an order from BSNL to deploy its fraud management solution 'Fraud Trace', for CellOne users. This fiscal, the company stood at Rs 96 crore compared to the Rs 76 crore in the last fiscal.

TCS, FSS, Sasken, and Tech Mahindra are more focused on their international operations and most of their work involves integration of software systems. Tech Mahindra's business model straddles both telecom service providers as well as equipment manufacturers. In the domestic market, the company has a deal with BSNL and Idea to deliver managed services.

Although CRM deployment in India is restricted to certain verticals, telecom is one vertical where maximum deployment has taken place.

Outlook
While the industry is driven toward next-generation OSS (NGOSS), other standardizations across the integration layers and converged offerings will be the focus. As new networks move toward 3G/4G, VoIP, WiMax, etc. On the BSS front, the focus will be on convergent billing and order management infrastructure.

Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in