Onboarding outsiders as a new OSS business model

The majority of these new services [such as healthcare, content and media, autonomous vehicles, smart homes etc.] require partnerships and will be based on a platform business model where the customer is not aware of who is providing which part of the service and to be quite frankly honest, wont care. All as they will care about is the customer experience and the end-to-end delivery of their service that they have paid for. This is where the opportunity for the telco comes and we need to think beyond data!
Aaron Boasman-Patel
here on TM Forum Inform.

Are your OSS tools already integrating with third-party services?

Do your catalog / orchestration engines already call upon microservices from outside your organisation? Perhaps it’s something as simple as providing a content service bundled with a service provider’s standard bitpipe service. Perhaps it’s also bundled with an internal-facing analytics service or an outward-facing shopping cart service.

A telco isn’t going to want to (or be able to) provide all of these services but can use partnerships and catalog items to allow each unique customer to build the bundled offer they want.

This is where catalogs and microservices potentially represent a type of small-grid model. There are already many APIs from third-party providers and the catalog / orchestration tools already exist to support the model. For many telcos, it will take a slight mindset shift – to embrace partnerships (ie to discard the “not invented here” thinking); to allowing their many existing bit-pipe subscribers to sell and bill through the telco platform (embrace sell-through); to build platforms and processes to allow for simple certification and onboarding of third-parties.

If your current OSS isn’t already integrating with third-party services, is it on your roadmap? Then again, does it suit your proposed future business models?

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