Optus undertakes major OSS upgrade

Optus is six months into a three-year effort to upgrade its operational support systems (OSS) in order to consolidate the suite onto one platform.

The project - Optus' first significant OSS upgrade in a decade - will deploy technology from NEC subsidiary NetCracker Technology across all Optus services: wireless, broadband, data, voice, ICT services and IP telephony services for both business and consumer customers.

The products will fulfil functions across the chain from service ordering, inventory and activation to network configuration and planning. Optus declined to comment.

A telco analyst specialising in OSS who declined to be named said Optus had been forced to address its environment of disparate OSS systems collected over the years from a variety of vendors.

"They get locked into a cycle where it becomes very expensive to make updates to those systems every time they want to introduce another service. So every few years they need to start with a clean slate."

NEC today said it would also provide a range of professional services to Optus including program management and governance, solution implementation and integration, systems consolidation, data migration, legacy system decommissioning, and testing, support, and training.

iTnews understands NEC and NetCracker will deploy around 50 staff, both locally and overseas, to the project.  

Operational support systems are becoming strategic for telcos, according to analyst firm Gartner.

OSS was previously in the domain of engineering or operations departments, Gartner reported, but is increasingly being used by other lines of business such as marketing as organisations realise the strategic importance of the data to link operational technical planning with actual customer data.

"This CSP evolution necessitates single central solutions that merge fragmented processes across various organisational entities, in order to automate and expedite end-to-end fulfilment and operational processes," Gartner said.