Improving your profits through automation: quickly design, develop and deploy new services

By Andrew Hurrell, Director, Marketing, Atreus Systems, Inc.

As Director of Marketing at Atreus Systems, Andrew is responsible for all aspects of marketing software and services for Atreus' industry-lleading Service Fulfillment solution. With over 18 years of telecommunications experience, Andrew has established a solid track record in launching strategic marketing programs and delivering quality products quickly and profitably. Andrew maintains a high-llevel of technology experience where he has held a series of senior management roles with Vibrant Solutions, Acterna, CrossKeys Systems, iSTAR and Bell Canada.

Abstract
With networks in place, service providers are poised to offer and bundle an endless array of new services. Today's available technologies, such as IP, give providers the ability to offer diverse and profitable new services like Voice Over IP (VoIP), Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Managed Security, Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, Home Networking, etc. Without the ability to quickly trial, launch, manage and support service offerings, profits from these services become unobtainable. This paper examines the key business problems that arise when offering new services and explains the systems requirements to meet these challenges.

Follow the money:
the evolution of services Recent investments and growth in broadband access are now translating into significant opportunities for value-added IP services. This is a critical opportunity, as most service providers are being forced to consider new sources of revenue, especially those who are exposed to the financial risk of legacy service revenues that are being driven down through re-pricing and customer churn. In fact, successful service providers will be rewarded for their effectiveness in transitioning commodity access customers to high-margin, IP-based network, application and content services targeted to the needs and interests of specific consumer and business market segments. This inevitable transition creates daunting challenges related to designing, deploying and delivering a new breed of services.

To keep pace, service providers must rapidly expand their suite of value-added product offerings to include new services such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Managed Security, Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, Wireless, and Voice over IP (VoIP), among others. This expansion is being driven both by competitive market forces and by the lure of increased revenue from these applications, but is complicated by large up front service launch expenses, and a generally poor leverage of investments made in individual services that do not necessarily translate into improved performance across an entire service portfolio.

Another important factor is the need to roll out services with increasing frequency. As market competition intensifies and differentiation is made more difficult, successful providers will gain first-mover advantage by striving to stay ahead of the competition with new and innovative service packages. Failing that, service providers must narrow the gaps and respond quickly to their competitors' moves. In either case, as service portfolios broaden, providers must launch new services more quickly than ever. If the increasing burden of supporting a growing portfolio slows the time to market for additional services, service providers will begin to fall behind competitors in the market.

Your network is ready -are you?
Service providers are faced with the dual challenge of generating new service offerings while streamlining operations and network infrastructure. The normal mode of operation is and will continue to be to drive down costs while finding new sources of revenue. While telecommunications networks are ready to handle many new types and combinations of services, most service providers are not. They may have access to the necessary technology to do so, but lack the resources or processes required to turn the raw technology into revenue-generating offerings.

Developing and deploying value-added services, does not necessarily mean replacing one service or service type with another. Rather, new services such as Unified Messaging and Collaboration, Hosted Applications, and VPNs are best viewed as extensions of the portfolio that includes traditional telecommunications offerings.

The operational differences introduced with a diversified portfolio of new services require service providers to adopt a standards-based approach to service design, development, and deployment.

Service business case problems
The business case for new services is highly sensitive to launch time, take rate, and unit price. While there is subscriber demand for a wide range of services, the business case can be spoiled by high start-up costs, low initial market penetration, or slow time to market. Impacts on existing infrastructure and systems, customization of services, and a belief that new services are too complex and dynamic, are but a few of the perceived challenges faced by providers.

As early entrants into the market have discovered, innovation can be both expensive and unpredictable. The up-front costs and risks associated with the wide scale deployment of value-added services add up quickly, due largely to the number of resources and manual processes required to deliver services to customers. In absence of the elusive "killer application", the real challenge for service providers is to lower the break-even point for multiple service offerings, allowing each one to be economically viable on its own.

An infrastructure investment that results in low incremental cost and rapid introduction of new services is required to maximize the business case for new services. In order to be cost effective, service providers must employ a design-to-deployment- to-delivery approach using re-usable models instead of starting from scratch for each service offering. This results in functions and processes that are consistent and span suites of services, reducing user errors, system duplication, and unnecessary cost.

Without such flexibility, service providers need to carefully evaluate market requirements before deciding to launch new products. Because of the effort and time required to launch new offerings, services providers tend to hold back all but the most popular or in-demand products. By streamlining and automating the complex tasks of designing, developing and deploying value-added services, service providers enable a broad range of network, connectivity, messaging, next-generation voice, hosted and managed application, entertainment and educational services to be brought to market in a rapid and cost-effective manner.

Steering clear of the "killer app" trap
For carriers, investing in a single "killer app" is not only risky from the business case standpoint, but is also extremely costly to both provision and manage on an ongoing basis. The ideal solution is to invest in models that allow for the incremental build of a number of specific, tailored and adjustable solutions.

Embracing a model-driven approach to service design, development, and deployment is vital to the business case for a portfolio approach to new services. In a model-driven approach the various elements of any given service offering are modeled. This allows the building blocks -including technology, process or systems -to be defined once but used repeatedly for many successive projects. Only a model-driven approach unlocks the ability to make incremental investments in service capability and to have these investments benefit the portfolio as a whole, maximizing re-use by building the next service using components from the last.

The challenges in adopting a model-driven integration strategy can seem overwhelming. Separate standards for network interoperability, application integration, business processes, and service features need to be embraced in a practical fashion. The resulting models need to be both detailed and feature rich, abstract enough to apply to a variety of equipment and systems, yet specific enough to result in a predictable and robust implementation.

The way to collect and administer each of the model elements is best described as a service library. The library is a repository of available items that can be checked out and used as often as needed. In addition, the library also tracks versions and due dates and records where items are being used. Such information is critical when any item is updated and changes need to be propagated to all its users. An effective service library exploits industry standards to provide robust, tested, and interoperable implementations of components for leading networking devices, authentication servers, multi-media gateways, voice switches (IP and POTS), and application servers. It makes these available in business processes that address the requirements of ordering, design, activation, customer care, and billing, and supports a single integration into each of these OSS/ BSS capabilities that is leveraged across the entire portfolio.

A service model captures the capabilities of systems and business processes in a way that facilitates re-use across a portfolio of services. A wide range of standards are relevant to the design, development, and deployment of these models. Once assembled in the service library, the set of building block components captures valuable intellectual property from a variety of standards and make this information available for re-use in services. It is these components taken from the service library that are combined to create service offerings. A mechanism that publishes the modeled services into a run-time environment at deployment time provides the final critical capabilities. This deployment mechanism allows newly-created or modified services to effectively be made available. Without a deployment mechanism, the benefits of modeling and definition are minimized since several manual steps may still be required to launch new services or to update existing ones.

Achieving rapid service introduction
Regardless of the market or bundle of services, there is an increasing need to compress time. New services that arrive in the market too late -or existing services that do not meet consumer needs -are non-starters. With competition from many sources and shrinking market windows of opportunity, service providers must be able to quickly execute on business strategies in order to create and maintain significant market share. The rapid introduction of a portfolio of new services requires the marriage of existing infrastructure with the equipment and systems needed to deliver new, IP-based functionality. Traditionally, this requirement has been addressed on a service-by-service basis through specific integration projects, resulting in high incremental time and cost per service, and making a consistent end-user experience difficult to achieve.

Many service providers recognize the need for infrastructure investments that make systems integration easier. These programs realize cost reductions in per-service integration activities. Incorporating flexible design tools with a modeling framework promotes controlled yet flexible improvements in both design and delivery. A model-driven integration strategy also adds the benefits of re-use and interoperability, significantly reducing the amount of integration that is required on a per service basis. In essence, a service provider's ability to modify bundles and offer new or customized services should increase as time goes on. In other words, service delivery velocity needs to increase. Many times, the opposite occurs -new services become more complex to roll-out, each taking progressively more time to deploy. The result is deceleration rather than acceleration in service delivery.

Conclusion:
the winning formula is service delivery velocity For service providers to survive and thrive they must generate increased revenue from existing customers, while attracting new customers with compelling new service offerings. This will require varying amounts of customer retention, acquisition and up-selling. In this highly competitive environment, the ability to offer richer services will invariably assist in these efforts. Richer services allow providers to hold or raise prices, reduce churn and win new customers. The combined effect of these factors is clearly beneficial in the quest for revenue.

Services are becoming more sophisticated and challenging to offer. Service providers must be able to offer many increasingly complex services, in less time, in order to meet the demands of the competitive marketplace. The requirement is straightforward: new services are rapidly built upon existing services, combining and extending elements as needed. The service creation environment, therefore, needs to leverage existing offerings through the reuse of processes and components in order to enable long-term viability. The race is already well underway. Successful service providers understand the need to accelerate service delivery velocity and will set themselves apart with a competitive advantage by using flexible, telecom-specific tools to build and deploy increasingly complex and valuable services.

About Atreus Systems™
Atreus Systems™ is a leading provider of software solutions for rapid IP service creation and provisioning. The company's flagship product, Atreus xAuthority™, is a service fulfillment solution that enables global communications providers to extend their existing systems to profitably deliver new services like Voice Over IP, Virtual Private Networks, Managed Security and Managed Applications. Atreus Systems is a privately held Delaware company financed by leading telecom venture capital firms including Aliant, Inc, BDC Venture Capital, Blueprint Ventures, Meritage Private Equity, Mobius Venture Capital, SAIC Venture Capital Corporation, Skypoint Capital Corporation, and TELUS Ventures.

For more information please contact Andrew Hurrell, ahurrell@atreus-systems.com Or visit www. atreus-systems.com

Atreus Systems, the Atreus Systems logo, Atreus xAuthority and all Atreus Systems products are trademarks of Atreus Systems, Inc. or its subsidiaries and are used under license. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.