Prime shifts and trends in OSS market worldwide

Shift in OSS spending from North America to Western Europe, APAC and ME
Saturation in the market for traditional voice services in North America and simultaneous wireless market growth in European Union, Asia Pacific and Middle East have resulted into surprising shifts in global Spending for OSS applications.
North America has witnessed stagnating growth in 2G and 3G services in year 2007 while in EU, APAC and ME, favoring policies and increasing acceptance of 3G services has resulted into high growth in OSS spending of operators.

In North America, the fixed line market has saturated due to the universal and life time policies introduced by the operators hence the growth in OSS market growth is slowing down. OSS software license spending in this geography has witnessed 11.207%growth in fixed line segment and 13% in wireless segment in 2007. However, in absolute terms, increase in OSS software license spending in North America is second highest to Western Europe.

OSS Software License Expense(US$mn)

Overall Wireless Fixed Line
Growth (%) Growth(%) Growth (%)

Western Europe 12.159% 8.629% 15.220%
Eastern Europe 14.909% 13.989% 17.170%
Asia Pacific 11.663% 9.307% 14.556%
Latin America 11.699% 19.274% 8.135%
North America 11.982% 13.006% 11.207%
Middle East 17.550% 18.833% 14.206%


OSS Service+Support+Maintenance Expense(US$mn)

Overall Wireless Fixed Line
Growth (%) Growth(%) Growth (%)

Western Europe 8.451% 5.208% 11.232%
Eastern Europe 10.550% 9.883% 12.192%
Asia Pacific 9.950% 7.878% 12.603%
Latin America 7.869% 15.641% 4.257%
North America 9.058% 9.634% 8.633%
Middle East 15.174% 16.698% 11.095%

There is high shift in OSS spending in fixed line segment from North America to Western Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East where much higher growth in Software license side and service, support & maintenance side is observed.

Shift in OSS product suite

Till now, the lion’s share of OSS functionality has come from billing systems which are crucial to save revenue leakages. But now, as voice services are not able to generate higher revenues, service providers have shifted their focus to value added services like IPTV, VoIP, Wireless Broadband, Switched Digital Video, MobileTV and VAS etc.
This has resulted into high priority for network management and service assurance to deploy services faster. Therefore, there is a growth of 15% and 17% respectively in terms of revenues globally in 2007.
Service creation of incremental features and delivery of new information products are growing most rapidly in broadband, as opposed to fixed line or wireless sectors. In this sector, top producing vendors include Ericsson, HP, NTT Comware, and Alcatel.

Trends in OSS market worldwide

1.Consolidation of the sector

COMPANY DEALS

AMDOCS Cramer Systems, July 2006
Qpass, April 2006
Longshine, June 2005

ORACLE MetaSolv Software, October 2006
Portal, April 2006
Siebel Systems, September 2005
PeopleSoft, January 2005

TELCORDIA Granite Systems, March 2004

IBM Micromuse, July 2006

INTEC EUR Systems, February 2005

Starting from 2006 to now, both the worldwide OSS market and telecom market, have witnessed a similar trend of consolidation. Big companies are trying to build software suites to establish their footprint in telecom OSS market. The main benefit of OSS software suites is that the pre-integrated suites will allow carriers to save integration costs and implementation time.

According to Telcordia strategy, OSS point solutions must evolve to become part of more integrated suites to survive.

1.Tier 1 CSPs will not prefer to work with small OSS vendor unless it is backed by a big player.
2.Equipment Vendors & System Integrators are extending relationship with OSS vendor by providing IT outsourcing option
3.Today, three key differentiating factors for any player in OSS domain is integration capability, innovative product suits and solid client relationships. The worldwide OSS market is diversified with many global and local players competing for market share in various regional markets.
4.Today, the trend is to offer end to end OSS solution therefore, many vendors have started functioning in this direction looking forward to develop assurance and fulfillment solutions for converged networks.
5.Vendors in the market mainly differentiate themselves by the scope of their product suite, the standards and advanced features that they support the scalability of their offerings, the ability to provide professional services and the modularity and interoperatibility of their solutions.
6.Today the trend is that leading telecom providers have a preferred list of OSS ISVs and SIs. Carriers are working with ISVs that either provides strong professional services or have solid relationships with SIs or network equipment providers. In response to this trend, OSS vendors have developed their products from point applications such as inventory management to full product suite.


Posted By : HIREN RUPANI