Ahead of Mobile World Congress 2014, Ericsson has announced the launch of ‘Service Agility’, a stack of pre-integrated OSS/BSS applications.
Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Support Solutions, Ericsson says:
By fusing together two mature and market-leading product areas,our widely-deployed real-time service enablement platform and our catalog-driven OSS/BSS management functions, into the Service Agility solution, our customers can achieve the speed and flexibility needed to differentiate in their marketplace, thus increasing profitability and meeting consumer demand.
Service agility, the ability for CSPs to configure and launch new classes of services more quickly, has long been the big promise of OSS. The introduction of service/product catalogs and service management in the last 5-10 years was meant to build on the core automation and activation capabilities of OSS to add the required platform flexibility. In practice, adding more OSS applications, no matter how clever and flexible, did not lead to more service agility. Why? Most likely because more applications equals more up-front configuration and integration, actually increasing the effort and cost to deliver a working OSS solution.
Hence, Ericsson’s announcement leads with the pre-integrated, pre-configured aspects of their Service Agility product/solution/thing.
That is, of course, a fine line to walk: How pre-configured can an OSS solution be if it needs to both adapt to each CSP’s unique business processes and offer flexible service configuration on a multi-layer, multi-tech, multi-vendor network? You’ll have to ask Ericsson. Props if they’ve nailed it.
The announcement is not rich in detail: I guess they’d like you to rock up to their booth (understatement) at MWC to learn more.
You can read the hyperbole-rich press release here, but their YouTube announcement is much more digestible: