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India is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the region and leading industry players in the OSS/BSS market expect the market for OSS/BSS to outpace global trends in terms of growth rate. Though the telecom industry is doing well, thanks to the phenomenal growth in the number of telecom subscribers, almost all the telecom operators are losing revenue in the course of their daily operations, and recent studies point to losses as high as 12-15% of the total turnover.

Innovation and differentiation may be the key for both enterprises and vendors to satisfy their customers. Changes in regulatory rules have already opened up the market for greater competition and hastened consolidation-providing significant opportunities for operators to enhance their competitive position via innovation, differentiation and becoming more agile and cost effective in rolling out new services or services in new areas. Some of the main drivers for growth in turn will be the consolidation of disparate OSS/BSS systems into one and to improve cost and enhancement of OSS/BSS systems to roll out more complex or innovative services ahead of competition.

Increasing competition in higher growth telecommunication segments such as mobile data, VoIP, IPTV and hosted application services are driving the growth in OSS market. Due to this, CSPs should not only launch the services quickly, but they must also bill them accurately and provision them efficiently to stay ahead.

The CAGR of the global OSS/BSS industry in the past 5 years has been in the range of 6-7% and is forecasted by some analyst group to grow at this rate for the next 5 years. But there are many hurdles on their path to achieve a consistent growth in the coming years.

Cost Concerns
This subject has been an interesting area for discussion in the Indian context, a market that is price sensitive and flooded with too many players. Surprisingly, the tendering approach has definitely not helped the incumbent operators to achieve reduced cost of purchase and continued support and maintenance. Competition, improvement in technology and options for shorter timeline association with vendors is critical. Traditional methods like seven-year maintenance, vague functional specifications, and focus on hardware efficiency has sometimes achieved contradicting results. Billing system implementations deal with mission critical parts of a service provider's business-the management of customers and revenue. As such, it is vital that implementations of billing systems are as smooth and low risk as possible. However, this does not necessarily mean implementation cost will be high or escalate.

Improve Process Efficiency
Quality, cost management and process efficiency are related issues. If an OSS/BSS system is built using a disciplined approach to software quality and includes rigorous testing processes then it will obviously perform more efficiently. But this efficiency is also determined by the business processes which it supports within an overall OSS infrastructure as well as the other systems within the infrastructure.

A leading company's tailor-made product portfolio includes products which broadly manage process quality and process efficiency in a cost effective way, addressing sales and marketing processes, order management and service activation processes, customer care processes, service & revenue assurance processes, billing & collections processes and finally revenue settlement processes.

Cost Efficient Systems
Management of cost will result into better bottom line and this can assist enterprises to go ahead in turbulent times. Despite the overwhelming growth in telecom market in India, revenue loss in the daily operations of telecom companies is yet to be curbed in a big way.

These alarming losses come from an accumulation of apparently minor individual errors such as a call rated incorrectly, a record arrives too late to be included on a bill, or maybe an order processing issue resulting in inconsistent provisioning. Multiply these by many thousands, it all adds up to a huge drain on any organization and the fraudsters in the network. And the problem can only get worse, as 3G brings further complexity to networks, allowing a whole new set of fraud to take place. The focus on content brings new partnerships and more complex revenue sharing models. Therefore, there is a need for comprehensive revenue maximization solution.

Intuitively, business challenge in growing markets is actually revenue generation/capture as opposed to cost efficiency. However, declining ARPUs and growing competition from disruptive technologies force operators to continually look at cost efficient models.

In India, there are companies whose products are designed specifically to manage process automation to reduce costs and process data as efficiently as possible. Another product line addresses multi-service mediation, service activation and revenue assurance, focusing on accurate and complete order capture and service activation, comprehensive event collection (from both switching infrastructure and IP networks elements) and also error management, to process errors before they become significant cost issues. Meanwhile, 'Charging and Billing' product line from a leading player concentrates on retail revenue management, charging and billing processes, to ensure that the company's subscriber activity is properly and accurately captured and recorded, significantly across multiple services and multiple subscriptions. This involves not just billing, but also charging for services in real-time (in the case of prepaid and some IP services), as well as credit and collections management and the application of revenue recognition rules and processes for accurate financial analysis and reporting.

One of the suggestions to improve quality/cost efficiency may include ROC (Revenue Operations Center)-an integrated operational infrastructure that helps telecom operators to monitor, control and assure integrity of the entire revenue chain.