Is scaled OSS/BSS multi-tenancy a thing?

We talked yesterday about the commoditisation of telco services and the part that OSS/BSS have to play in differentiation. We also talked about telcos retaining a few competitive advantages despite the share-of-wallet inroads made by OTT, software and cloud service providers recently. Managed services is one area where some of those advantages converge.

Quite a few years ago I worked with one of Australia’s largest telcos on a managed service account for one of Australia’s big four banks. The value of the managed service contract was worth a couple of billion dollars. It covered the whole gamut of what a telco can offer. Voice, data, mobility and unified communications of course, but also branch / office comms fit-outs, international WANs, IT services, security, custom help-desk, dedicated service delivery management and much more.

Big companies tend to prefer to deal with big companies, especially when the services are complex and wide-ranging. A bank like this one could realistically only negotiate with a handful of telcos because only a few could provide viable size and scope to meet their needs… if they wanted to keep it to a consolidated procurement event.

This bank wasn’t this telco’s only large managed services contract. They had quite a few similar clients. The deals were all incredibly cut-throat between the other big telcos, but they were still profitable, especially once the variations started coming in. The telcos are not in a race to the bottom on managed services like the commodity data services we discussed yesterday.

I found it interesting that the telcos mainly focused on providing these managed service deals to the ASX200 (Australia’s top 200 companies by market capitalisation), give or take. So they service the top 200 (ish) with managed services and the long, long tail with retail services. But of course mid-market companies fall somewhere in the middle – big enough to require custom solutions, but too small to warrant the type of managed services the bank was getting.

So, now let me put the OSS/BSS spin on this situation (yes, it took me a while). At this telco, each of its big managed service contracts had completely bespoke OSS/BSS/portal solutions. Of course they had a core OSS/BSS – the factory that handled assurance and fulfilment for customers large and small – but every managed service had completely unique, satellite OSS/BSS/portals at their customer interface. For example, the core ran eTOM, the customer interface often demanded ITIL.

This telco couldn’t offer managed services to the mid-market because it was too expensive to set up the unique tooling. That meant there were almost no repeatability or economies of scale in processes, reporting, data science, skill portability, etc.

It bewildered me that they hadn’t invested the time into creating a cookie-cutter approach to all these satellite OSS/BSS/portals. Sure, each would need some customisation, but there was also significant potential for repeatability / consistency.

Now this may sound a bit bewildering to you too. But it’s not just the telco’s short-term thinking that leads to this situation. Most OSS/BSS vendors don’t build products with this type of multi-tenancy in mind.

The ability to spin up/down satellite OSS/BSS/portals, each with configurability but consistency, is not common. Importantly, nor is secure partitioning that ensures each customer only sees their data even when using shared infrastructure (including NOC / WOC / SOC as well as network infra and core OSS/BSS).

You know, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone else talk about this type of use-case. Multi-tenancy, yes, to an extent, but not at managed services scale.

Is this even a thing? Should it be? Could it be? You be the judge! I’d love to hear your thoughts / experiences. Please leave a comment below if your OSS/BSS stack supports this use-case or if your telco has developed a cookie-cutter approach. What approach do you use?

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