Ca$h is King

The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination.”
James Buchan
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As the old saying goes, “cash is king.” Or in CSP parlance, revenue is king.

Does this mean that the CSP’s OSS must help generate revenue? Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt and in fact this should be the target for all new OSS. We need to get more innovative in the search for providing more visible and valuable information to the CSP’s customers, information valuable enough for them to want to pay the CSP for the privilege.

Generally a new OSS business case is based around Revenue, CAPEX or OPEX. In some cases brand value also comes into play, with OSS being the warranty mechanism that ensures outages are minimised.

Every new OSS is delivered into a different environment and the business case has a different organisational dynamic to work around. Invariably the executive will sign off the investment, so the business case has to meet their objectives in return for a large outlay of funds over a multi-year time-frame. These days it seems that the revenue play is more powerful to the C-suite than OPEX savings when it comes to getting their approval for an OSS project for example.

But then the business case, or the technical analysis that underpins it, needs to have a completely different angle to cater for the BAU (Business as Usual) teams that will be impacted by the OSS. They’re generally sold on what will make their life easier as well as CAPEX and/or OPEX reductions for their budget targets.

Then behind most business cases there needs to be a metric like ROI (Return on Investment), Payback Period or the like. If the vendor prepares the inputs to these metrics, there is often scepticism, so it’s important for the vendor to get key stakeholders at the CSP to be seen to be helping develop these. In other words, ROI needs to formed on the back of the proverbial napkin rather than injected from the vendor’s slide-pack.

With the objective of getting more OSS Business Cases approved around the world and keeping our industry thriving, what have been your experiences, successful or otherwise with regards to initiating OSS projects?

PS. Please visit this link if you need a Guide for developing your OSS Business Case.

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