Final Thoughts

TRI: Hossein, thank you for sharing these great insights and opportunities for the OSS/BSS industry. Do you have any final advice to offer CIOs and CTOs struggling to transform their businesses?

Eslambolchi: Obviously the temptations to keep the status quo are enormous. Large telecom organizations refuse to change unless there's a major crisis. And systems integrators and network equipment vendors have a stake in keeping the environment complex because that's where they make money.

But we need to rise above these obstacles: it's our job is to simplify our environment and become efficient enough to move our customer to spend more money with us -- and to do so in a much tighter timeframe.

Lots of people think "transforming" means inserting a new technology in the network, but if you first think about aligning your database of record and your business processes, technology can get deployed right on top of that.

The same goes for harvesting next generation business opportunities. Only when you start layering value-added services and advertising on top of a reliable database of record -- only then do you start generating the extra revenue and customer trust that drives new business.