At The Center of Modern Commerce — 
But Stalled and Uncertain. . .

Here’s one sure sign that your company — or your industry, for that matter — is bogged down in an operational quagmire: You have killer products. . .they’re in high demand. . .but it’s almost impossible to turn these gems into a rich and reliable source of profits.

If you’re in, or sell to, the telecom community and don’t see the relevance of this scenario — it’s time to wake up. Look around and you’ll see collapsing, contracting, or cash-starved carriers; frustrated customers; thousands of your comrades losing their jobs; and. . . the most dazzling array of communications products the world has ever seen.

It doesn’t make sense.

Today, you’ll find out why, and discover how you can fix what’s broken. . .

“Communications” is one of the words used most often by pundits to characterize the very essence of our fast-paced modern civilization.

 “Communications” is also part of our industry’s name. Telecommunications. If ever there was an industry that should be shooting through the roof. . .it should be telecom — and it should be happening now.

So why is it that our industry isn’t better able to turn this wonderful confluence of circumstances — the right time, the right place, and the right products — into stability, steady growth, and sure profit?

Who or what is to blame for our stumbling?

Blame The “Usual Suspects”. . . or Look in The Mirror?

Is merciless competition cannibalizing telecom? Is merger-mania playing havoc with our organizations’ infrastructures and corporate compasses? Or is it simply that we’re just one more victim of a suffering economy that’s created customers who aren’t buying like they once were?

Absolutely, all these “usual suspects” are guilty to some extent. But take your search no further, and you’re missing the real, painful, but ultimately constructive, truth: Great companies can weather external adversities like these and still soldier on. If your company — or our industry — isn’t up to the challenge it’s because our most debilitating problems are internal.

Look carefully and honestly in the mirror, and you’ll see the problems that are really keeping you back. . .

• Ineffective systems integration

• Faulty or half-hearted OSS solutions

• Outmoded, counterproductive customer-facing programs

• Missteps on the road to e-business 

• Mistakes in vendor selection

• And more. . .

It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth. But if you have the will, the fortitude, and the determination to be a winner in the current economic/industry environment, every single one of these problems can be solved. Starting today. Starting right here.

TRI’s new Report, Telecom OSS & E-Business Integration, tackles every one of these issues head on. Complex issue by complex issue. . .the Report’s nine chapters show carriers and vendors alike exactly where we are, how we got there, and where we’re headed.

TRI has done the work for you. And what we give you is comprehensive, but not complex. What you’ll read is clear, understandable, and actionable.  And we don’t waste a minute of your valuable time. Telecom OSS & E-Business Integration gets the ball rolling immediately. . .

  Chapter 1: 

Telecom Carriers — Business & Service Trends

From the small, struggling, under-financed startup to the local exchange giants, the first chapter of our new Report takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour of our industry’s main players. We’ll show you how they work, why they may not be working so well these days, and how they could work better.

Large carriers,  IOCs, Gigabit Ethernet providers, wireless carriers, big city and rural operators — these, and more, are analyzed.

Many of our industry’s products are so potent they’re darn near addictive, marketing has been ubiquitous, but broadband Internet deployment, for example, was declining well before Wall Street’s slide or September 11^th’s horrors.

What gives?

According to The Wall Street Journal, a typical telecom spends about $3 on telecommunications and equipment costs for every $10 it brings in from a dial-up customer.  By contrast, it spends about $8 for every $10 it brings in from a $50/month broadband customer.

Here, you’ll be walked through the larger operational climate that has caused this broadband, and other, frustrations.  At this important juncture in our industry’s history — when it’s almost unnatural to compartmentalize our members using terms like “long-distance,” “local,” “wireless,” “cable,” or “ISP” — what are the bedrock obstacles and opportunities carriers of all stripes are facing?

Chapter I of TRI’s Report, Telecom Carriers & Service Providers: The Business & Operational Climate, gives you the answers. Here are some of the main issues our Report’s opening chapter explores. . .

• Bandwidth Grows, Traffic Falls, Mergers Never Stop: It’s an ugly and profitless sight — long-distance carriers bloodying each other in a price war to fill their pipes with traffic. And the pace of mergers is relentless as carriers try to further cut costs by gaining economies of scale. But the consolidation solution has proven to be far from the panacea many envision. A merger creates an enormous array of challenges — none of which your customer want to know about. One of the most daunting issues is reconciling the priorities of your IT and OSS people. Telecom Carriers & Service Providers uses real-world case-studies to illustrate the kind of problems consolidating companies face as they attempt to merge their systems and decide which to keep and which to jettison.
  
  

• The CLECs: Young, Restless, Beleaguered: Think back to the distant past. Like two years ago. Our industry was awash in a crowd of startup local exchange carriers determined to steal market share away from the incumbent RBOCs. Today, wickedly complex operational problems, lackluster customer demand, fierce competition, and dwindling capital have all but snuffed out the good times. Here’s what went wrong from an OSS, business, organizational, and ownership perspective. Also here are concrete ways the startups could have dodged many of these painful bullets. This is very interesting and actionable stuff — both for young carriers themselves and for the vendors who wish to serve them.
  
  

• Rural CLECs -- Country Before it was Cool: Not too long ago many startups figured that venture-capital financing, lightening-fast business plans, and just plain moxie would empower them to build national networks overnight. In no time at all, they’d be competing on equal footing with the RBOCs in metro markets. They scoffed at the more circumspect LECs who opted for the rural markets, figuring that’s where the RBOCs were more vulnerable. Guess who’s laughing now? Using CenturyTel as an example, you’ll see how marshalling resources, geographic clustering, and a prudent expansion rate led to victory. 
  
  

• DoCoMo in Cocomo? — Wireless’s Next Big Thing: The wireless industry is abuzz over the imminent arrival of mobile Internet and next-generation wireless handsets. The i-mode standard currently feeds 23 million hungry subscribers in Japan —  1/5^th of the country’s population! American wireless carriers look forward to stringing a similar technology from sea to shining sea, and into all the rural space in between (including Cocomo).  This and other emerging wireless OSS issues are explored.  We’ll make sense out of the alphabet soup of wireless transmission standards, Over the Air Activation, and explain why November 24^th, 2002, should be marked on the calendar of all wireless carriers.
  
  

• The Corporate Network Buffet: Frame. . .GigaE. . .VPN: Enterprise customers have never had more telecom choices available to them, but sorting through all the service provider hype can make your head spin.  Through a lot of patient digging, we cornered some top network experts who helped us sort out truth from fiction.  In this Chapter you’ll see how private networks evolved and understand the significance of metro Gigabit Ethernet.  You’ll also learn how SmartPipes has partnered with WorldCom and XO Communications to offer IP provisioning of VPN services to corporate accounts.

  Chapter 2:  

Provisioning, Network Inventory, Auto Discovery
& Field Service Delivery Systems

It has a nice ring to it, I confess, but the “Information Superhighway” isn’t really a useful — or accurate — metaphor for today’s telecommunications technology. Moreover, the image this expression conjures up does the telecom industry a disservice
.
The image of an Information Superhighway makes the whole telecommunications process seem far easier than it really is. Only telecom insiders are aware of the battles that are fought daily with massive and old provisioning systems, countless manual processes, and intricate business rules. All in all, ours is a down-and-dirty, unglamorous business — not the not the seamless, streamlined machine many outsiders imagine.

This misconception has led to many disappointments for both starry-eyed engineers and naïve venture capitalists.

At TRI, we believe the airline industry provides a far more accurate analogy to telecom’s challenge; both industries deliver their products — communication, people, and cargo, respectively — using high-tech platforms, and both rely on extremely complex systems that require considerable configuration and integration.

John Q. Public appreciates —  is even awed by — the miracle of aviation but the “miracle” of transporting voice and data is met with a yawn.

So let’s can the Information Superhighway. Telecom is a 747, not Interstate 95. 

Chapter 2, Provisioning, Network Inventory, and Auto-Discovery Systems looks at some of the key systems and technologies that allow our aircraft to fly. . .

• Provisioning's New Role: “Revenue Generator”: Today’s long distance market is every bit as commodity-driven as the automobile, apparel, toy, or beverage industries. And when everybody’s products basically serve the same purpose. . .how do you differentiate yours? Every service provider under the sun is looking for ways to offer a unique and tempting value proposition to the customer. And fast, flexible provisioning gives them the muscle they need. Here’s the new perspective: Don’t view provisioning as simply a recurring engineering cost; see it for what it is — a revenue generator. Here’s how to make it happen.
  
  

• Service Creation & Routing -- Explained: Concentrating extremely complex procedures into something you can hold in the palm of you hand, mull over, and actually understand has always been a hallmark of TRI’s reports. Telecom OSS & E-Business Integration is no different. Chapter 2 helps you become familiar with all that’s involved in provisioning a multi-vendor, multi-carrier network. You’ll learn about “service creation,” “service definition,” and how telecom transport using ATM crosses over with IP provisioning for the enterprise.
  
  

• Lighting Up Bandwidth in Real-Time: A 96 channel DWDM system has enough capacity to carry — in a single fiber pair — the traffic of all the major U.S. long distance carriers combined.  And that fiber is the diameter of a human hair. DWDM holds great promise for provisioning engineers, freeing them from the rigid architecture of SONET. This fiber optic technology will allow provisioning of long-haul and metropolitan wavelengths in real time. You should know about it and understand it.
  
  

• Copper: It’s Dull, It’s Old, It’s Indispensable: The copper local loop — it’s nothing but cables and legacy equipment we’d all rather just forget about. One little problem: it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than running broadband fiber links to every home. Local loop has become increasing strategic as our industry has matured. TRI unravels the local loop, revealing why it’s such a bottleneck for DSL provisioning and why it’s becoming increasingly important to small carriers bent on expansion. You’ll learn all about the provisioning pluses of “outside plant integration,” and discover why Telecordia and SaskTel International are leading the local-loop provisioning pack.
  
  

• Network Inventory -- “Know Thyself”: Network “inventory” means different things to different carriers, but having an accurate one is absolutely critical to the health of your OSS ecosystem. Without one, you’ll never be able to effectively automate service delivery. This chapter looks at the latest inventory trends — like “network resource management” and the jolt that JAVA has given to inventory provisioning software.  You’ll also learn why the latest capacity-based network resource systems are upstaging  the old and venerable engineering-based inventory systems like TIRKS.
  
  

• Discovering Buried Telecom Treasure: Suppose your network could identify for you — in real time — all those assets you think are in production. . .but really aren’t. Syndesis maintains that the carriers using its telecom discovery solution are saving in the range of 10% of their logical network assets.  Gain a deeper understanding of how the Syndesis solution works under the covers and why Bell Canada is so keen on this technology that it uploads network assets every night
  
  

• Field Service Delivery on Steroids: Today’s outside plant has fanned out from 50 central offices in a metropolitan area to 50,000 customer premises where sophisticated modems and facilities now reside.  Performance metrics, technician scheduling, and integrated logistics are all part of the moden “field service delivery” process.  Here you’ll learn the benefits of ViryaNet’s wireless dispatch and tracking system -- and why its system coordinates the work of 2,500 technicians at Citizens Communications.
  
  

  Chapter 3: 

Customer-Facing Systems: Order Management, CRM, 
& Sales Automation Systems

Let us not forget that for many decades the words “OSS” and “software” were not mentioned in the same breath. The Bell companies had their service reps take down service orders manually, on specialized forms. Then they’d head to the company “library” to track down prices and Universal Service Order Codes.

And you know something? It worked. Very few errors ever passed through the system because there was so much checking and cross-checking. Now, of course, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. . .

Too many people believe that OSS is nothing but software. Plunk down tens of millions of dollars on solutions and you’ll be all set, right? Wrong. For small startups, especially, it’s vital to remember that an effective OSS is first and foremost a group of trained people following a well-thought-out process. Get a manual process humming along. . .and then automate.

With new technology from Telcordia, one of the big Bells have taken a hybrid approach — take a few new systems and lay them over the old. Chapter 3, Customer-Facing Systems walks you through a Bell DSL provisioning and you’ll be impressed at how successfully the old and new work together. This chapter also dives into issues like. .

• Hype vs. Reality at The Call Center: You’ve no doubt read about those spiffy “dashboards” —loaded to the gills with enterprise systems — that are making life a snap for CSRs these days. Ever see one? I didn’t think so.  Customer-Facing Systems shows you what life is really like for CSRs these days and why synchronizing data for them is such a horrendous challenge. While “one and done” — handling all customer concerns with a single call — is the dream, poor OSS integration keeps waking us up. Outsourcing the call center is just one of the interesting options this chapter explores.
  
  

• Is The Fate of Order Gateways Spelled “XML”?: Information flow between the ILECs and the CLECs is not what one would call fluid. And this “electronic bonding” or “order gateway” is not facilitated by the fact that ILECs are constantly changing the rules by which the CLECs must play. Enter XML. Some industry analysts feel the emergence of this data exchange protocol will eliminate the need for electronic bonding. But hold on. Order gateways aren’t the real culprits anyway. They work quite nicely, for example, in the trouble ticket and LD wholesale arenas because they they’ve been coupled with good old human cooperation. Try it.
  
  

• A CRM Relationship Is Not A One-Night Stand: If you’re consistently able to give your customers the support they want and deserve. . .pat yourself on the back for a moment. But only for a moment — because now it’s time to get back to work. TRI gives some great examples of ways carriers can turn brief encounters with customers into lasting, fruitful relationships. You’ll learn how Siebel helped a major incumbent leveraged CRM to win back corporate customers from competitors.
  
  

• Inside a Large Telco’s Sales Organization: A typical large carrier will stratify its sales force into global, national, mid-market, and small-business accounts. While the CRM tools these folks use may vary, they all need account management software and the ability to plug into a database that will synchronize data with the home office. And they’d all love access to real-time status of trouble tickets and the ability to deliver fast, accurate quotes. Chapter 2 shows how you just might be able to deliver the goods to your sales force.
  
  

• Extra-Strength Relief for The Sales Order Headache: With some help from Knowledge Junction, we’d like to introduce you to the wonders of a Sales Guidance  System. It’s just what the doctor order for sales order maladies, and is particularly effective for pain caused by today’s complex data orders. A SGS is basically an automated checklist that takes your order from specific customer requirement. . .through product-catalog search. . .on to price quotation. . .forward to work order issuance. . .all the way to your emailed order confirmation. We’ll show you how it works, giving you examples that will be as familiar as home cooking.
  
  

• How to Manage Service Partners Like A Pro: Service outsourcing to third parties is a strong trend in our industry these days. A whole new category of software — “partner management systems” — has been created to help you do this with utmost efficiency. Although necessary and fruitful, partner relationships are not easily controlled and can leave you vulnerable. Here’s how to make sure everyone is doing their job and that your customers are being made happy.
  
  

• From OSS to Merchandizing: Many telecoms (of all sizes) are plagued by a disconnect between their financial and OSS systems. Very few product catalogs, for example, let you store the cost components of products and services. Link your OSS to your financials and you create a powerful data warehouse serving corporate, marketing, and engineering. Customer-Facing Systems shows you why this connection is just one of the customer-keeping systems you would do well to consider.

  Chapter 4: 

E-Commerce, E-Business, and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

It’s a cruel irony that telecom, surely the most “wired” of all industries on the planet, should be a laggard in the world of e-commerce. It’s not as if the Internet snuck up on us and caught us unprepared for its commercial opportunities: After the military, the very first users of ARAPnet were the telephone companies. So how did we miss the boat? Why is there no telecom equivalent of Amazon.com?

Truth is, telecom e-commerce is simply a lot harder to implement because we sell more than products: we sell relationships — continuous service.

Plus, we have the albatross of complex provisioning systems weighing us down. Unlike an Amazon.com, we can’t just ship our products to whoever punches the “Purchase Now” button. We’ve got to consider, for example, what products are available where and which customers can access them. And service reps have to work their way through all these thorns in order to ultimately match service to customer. So telecom e-commerce means having the software to come up with these answers.

Chapter 4 also considers the security issues involved with e-business, and how the “openness” of the Internet can run counter to the mindset of those who have been in telecom for a while. Here are some of the other topics we look at. . .

• E-Commerce: What’s Behind. . .What’s Ahead: TRI examines exactly where the telecom industry currently finds itself on the climb to the e-commerce mountain top. The milestones on the journey are typically labeled “attract,” “interact,” and “transact,” and you’ll find out exactly at which point on the journey our industry seems to have gotten bogged down. Now we’ve got to get unstuck. . .and continue the climb to the top.
  
  

• Web Self-Provisioning:  Your goal is to enable your customers to order services, increase bandwidth allocation, or modify QoS parameters for themselves. That’s called “web self-provisioning.” You’ll learn all about it, and then find out about the more mundane — but essential — work you must do to support it. Customer profiling and content filtering are also examined in this Chapter.
  
  

• E-Business as Legacy Enhancer: It’s perfectly appropriate to think of e-business as an application, much like Microsoft Office, with word processing, email, spreadsheets, etc. But for your application to work you must be linked to an infrastructure — a robust, interoperable platform — that allows you to plug and play. Find out what’s involved, learn how to transform your backend legacy into an e-business solution, and hear how BEA helped a major incumbent consolidate its billing systems with its e-business solution.
  
  

• Bandwidth for Resellers: Use It or Lose It: Either use that pipe for all it’s worth or you’re going to be losing money fast. Resellers and distributors will help you with your extra capacity. The diversity and number of these channels is nothing short of amazing. We’ll tell you how e-business solutions can keep these customers fully informed about the status of their pending orders. And even if service-order delays occur, the customer’s pain will be soothed by the knowledge that he has visibility into the process.
  
  

• Centrex is Having an E-Makeover: Telecom carriers have been peddling Centrex services for years, but maintenance headaches and manual updates have doomed Centrex  as an unprofitable service that wasn’t worth promoting very hard.  Now, one  OSS vendor has developed a fully automated system that’s integrated with a local provisioning and plant inventory system. Solutions like this pave the way for the next leap — to something we’ll call “E-Centrex” and the “smart building.” This stuff is coming right around the bend. . .learn about it now.
  
  

• EAI — Between Hype and A Hard Place: Enterprise Application Integration was heavily hyped when it arrived a couple of years ago, but now it’s being brought into focus by the unforgiving glare of hard reality. Fact is, few EAI projects have yielded the results expected by carriers. E-Commerce, E-Business, and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) goes into considerable detail about what is still an exceptionally promising solution, showing you what to look for, what best fits your particular organization, and how to select and maintain it with minimal expense.  You’ll also learn about how Kabira has raised EAI flexibility to a new level with its “adapter factory.”
  
  

  Chapter 5: 

Systems Integration & OSS Project Implementation

The telecom systems integration business has changed considerably during the past decade. Where once armies of consultants were called in to design a custom system, off-the-shelf solutions slowly gained popularity. Of course, the changing approach to systems integration is nothing more than a reflection of the seismic, unpredictable shifts that have occurred in our industry as a whole.

Long-term integration planning is viewed as too risky and too rigid, so smaller and shorter integration projects seem more sensible.  And this is why some of the best and brightest from firms like Accenture (a.k.a. Andersen Consulting) have left to start up OSS consulting practices — that’s where the action is.

TRI’s research has found that firms like CAP Gemini Ernst & Young have captured a nice corner of the integration market. Systems Integration & OSS Implementation explains why the “pre-integrated” approach these companies are taking is an excellent match for smaller and startup carriers. The main benefit? Perhaps it’s knowing that only one company has responsibility for your whole integration solution.

But what would our industry be without controversy and dissent? So, we’ll also present the views of those who believe that clients who opt for “pre-integration” do so at the expense of very valuable customization. We’ll referee this disagreement and then dig deeply into other integration and OSS topics that you’ll find both interesting and relevant. They include. 

• Consolidating Systems?  Let History Be Your Guide:  A former AT&T billing manager told us: “Consulting firms love systems integration projects because it’s their Lifetime Employment Act.”  Yes, overly ambitious and costly projects have cost large carriers, and have them wary. But TRI shows you how to learn from their mistakes. We’ll explain, for example, the peril of not identifying system work-arounds. You’ll learn how to deal with the pressure to consolidate data centers. And we’ll illustrate why a flexible architecture and regular doses of strategic thinking are so vital to integration’s long-term success.
  
  

• Systems Integration Opportunities: Integration vendors have fertile selling fields in all sectors of the telecom industry. That’s because carriers of all sizes are willingly linking themselves to e-marketplaces, the Internet, to extranets, and to other IP utilities like ASPs, service farms, and Internet data centers. Monitoring quality of services, building web infrastructures, and constructing firewalls and security systems are just a few of the tasks integrators will be called on to perform. This chapter of TRI’s new Report gives vendors some valuable insight into how best to position themselves and their products.
  
  

• Dodging the Project Management Bullet: I tell you this not to discourage you, but instead to stimulate your diligence: It’s been reliably estimated that the percentage of complex OSS projects that come in on time, within budget, and that meet functionality expectations currently hovers around a very dismal 15%. But you can buck the trend. In this Chapter, you’ll learn about what TMNG has identified as the ten major causes of OSS project failure. This compendium of advice could save your company enormous grief from integration projects gone sour.
  
  

 Chapter 6: 

OSS Selection: Architectural Choices, Buying
Strategies, and Vendor Management Tips

Canned or customized? That decision is close to the top of your list when you make the move to invest in an off-the-shelf OSS solution. The canned solution is a natural for startups who doesn’t have many internal processes in place as yet. And it takes much of the decision-making burden off your shoulders (because it makes them for you). A canned solution is cheap, reliable, has few frills, and is rigid. But its rigidity is a good thing — startups need the enforced process flow and pre-configured calling plans these solutions deliver. Now, canned solutions have their downside, too, and you’ll learn about them in this Chapter.

For the larger carriers, who know precisely what you want your OSS system to do, customized is the way to go -- and this is why custom shops like Telcordia and Amdocs are growing handsomely.

OSS Selection explores the many very specific issues you’ll want to consider as you make the important decision of which solution to buy, and from whom. We’ll show you how to really evaluate the products and how to nurture your vendors for maximum reciprocal satisfaction. Here are just a handful of the issues this Chapter explores. . .

• Will Large Carriers Reach for The Shelf?: Large enterprises have historically believed that that their organizations were so unique that only a custom-built solution would match their OSS needs.  But the winds are shifting, and the prime mover is the accelerating move to an e-business infrastructure in which smaller, faster-implemented projects are the norm. Massive, multi-year plans are not in order — the approach is more tentative — and this mindset makes off-the-shelf solutions more attractive.
  
  

• Best-in-Breed. Or Is It?: Going for the best off-the-shelf components for your OSS solution has always seemed the smartest path to take. But consider this: Integrating a half dozen applications from different vendors into a coherent whole is no piece of cake. And maintaining that integration won’t come cheap either. Plus, each of those 6 software vendors will be updating their products on different schedules — and that throws you back into the integration mode again.
  
  

• Telco-in-A-Box: Many have decided to forego best-of-breed buying and integration in order to purchase an OSS solution that’s already been put together for you by one vendor. This telco-in-a-box may not give you quite the functionality of a custom job, but it removes a host of integration worries and is perfect for startups with a small budget and a small IT staff. Drawbacks? You’re dependent on that one software vendor to always keep the product up-to-date.
  
  

• When in Doubt —Punt to a Service Bureau: If best-in-breed and telco-in-a-box both leave you cold, consider handing-off the OSS integration job to a service bureau. For many this makes sense. Our industry is shifting so much these days, that your business may change directions six months down the road. And that will require an overhaul of your OSS infrastructure. But if you’ve off-loaded your OSS chores to a service bureau, you avoid this huge hassle and cost. Something to consider.
  
  

• OSS Gets Wired for ASP: The Application Service Provider (ASP) is essentially a way to get an OSS solution delivered via the Internet. ASPs are made possible by the IDCs (Internet Data Centers) that sprung up during the dot com boom to service the large sites that had to be provisioned for intense amounts of traffic. OSS Selection gives you a crisp and intriguing glimpse into what we think will mature into a very attractive solution to OSS integration, combining the best of all current options.
  
  

• Make An OSS Vendor Choice You Can Live With: In these days of restricted capital and tight budgets it’s essential that carriers do a better job of selecting OSS software than they’ve done in the past. We’ll give you some very precise steps you can take and questions you can ask in order to make the right choice the first time. We’ll also show you exactly where you can find honest, unbiased opinions from those who have used the software you’re thinking of buying.
  
  

  Chapter 7:  

Selling and Marketing Telecom OSS Solutions

The telecom industry is a baffling one because of its complexity, its many diverse players, its fast-growing list of products and services, and the incredible pace at which it’s changing. If you think those of us in the industry have trouble getting our arms around our professional universe, think how outsiders must feel! And if those who want to serve our industry can’t understand it, what does that portend for the solutions they’re designing, implementing, and maintaining?

Chapter 7 is an outsider’s guide to telecom “written” by seasoned insiders — a look into the psyche of the industry sponsored by the keen insights and decades of experience of those who make our industry move. All courtesy of TRI’s ongoing dialogue with telecom insiders at many levels and in many operational and executive branches.

This is where ambitious OSS vendors should turn to get a leg up on their competition. Not only for selling a product but for successfully maintaining mutually prosperous relationships with telcos.

This is also the place where members of our own ranks can go for an interesting perspective on the way we do business, the sometimes quirky procedures we follow, and how we’re viewing the trends that will take us into the future. Here’s a sample of the issues Chapter 7 looks at. . .

• Timing Is Not Everything; But It’s Close: And knowing when to present what to new entrant telecoms is a big plus for any vendor. Remember — the vast majority of startups build their OSS piece by piece, over time, and it’s specific needs will be determined by where they find themselves in their growth cycle. TRI maps out what you, as a vendor, should know about these development phases and we explain what OSS software the carriers will be most interested in during each.
  
  

• Looking Behind The Curtain: It’s always nice to know whether the person to whom you’re selling something will be able to pay you. That a basic rule of commerce, and it applies at all levels of business — from lemonade selling to software marketing. To protect your business (and your job), it would be useful for you to recognize the vibrations given off by a startup that’s in financial peril. You’ll find them presented — in some detail — in Chapter 7.
  
  

• Get Inside Telecom Buyer Heads: We’ll explain to you what goes on in the head of a telecom  exec, how you can tell if they’re new to the game, and give you a look at the entrepreneurial mindset. You’ll also find out why teamwork at a startup is a reliable indicator of long-term stability. Selling and Marketing Telecom OSS Solutions reveals signs you should look for that will tip you off to the level of teamwork at your prospect’s organization. We’ll also give you some tips on dealing with those who push unrealistic deadlines and explain how to get on the winning side of budget battles.
  
  

• Sales Techniques That Work: Here’s how to tailor your message to operations, product, and development people; each will respond to a unique pitch and will need different kinds of reassurance. And you need to get IT to buy into your proposal. We’ll show you how. And this is vital: Never lose your credibility — you must always be very specific about what your software can — and can’t do.
  
  

• 6 Steps to A Contract Win: Here’s the lowdown — given to you from those who know telecom buying habits inside and out — on how to  PFocus on what makes you different  PSell your telecom knowledge  PPush interoperability  PShowcase your people  PPrepare a stellar presentation  PNegotiate a fixed time, price, and function contract.
  It’s all here.
  
  

 Chapter 8: 

Market Analysis & Recommendations

In Chapter 8 we take information presented in the Report’s other Chapters and mold it into analysis and recommendations your organization can act on. 

This is where TRI analysts take their ties off, get into a freewheeling discussion of OSS issues, and make some predictions.  Here are the main topics:

• Surviving and Prospering in the Telecom Ice Age -- What telecom buyers really want to hear.

• The 8 Hottest New OSS Solutions. . . and which vendor companies are leading the pack.

• The 5 Hottest New OSS Business Ideas. . . being implemented by telecom OSS and e-business vendors.

• Telcordia & its Challengers: An analysis of the market leader’s strengths, weaknesses, and the prospects for competitors

• The Cisco Kid & the Telecom World: Our take on the progress and challenges of deploying next generation telecom networks.

• E-Business - How fast will it ramp up, and where

• Telecom Carriers and ASPs: A blending scenario

• The Telecom Killer App: Our recipe for getting George Gilder to glow in the dark.

Both carriers and OSS companies will benefit from a 6-page table in Chapter 8 that segments 72 solution suppliers into 25 unique OSS company categories, commenting on each one’s market strengths and future telecom direction. 

  Chapter 9: 

Profiles of OSS Companies -- 
Understanding the Products & Strategic Direction 
of Telecom OSS Companies

If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ve seen plenty of flow diagrams where the telecom network is shown as a cloud. 

Lines go in and out of the cloud, but you never know all the important things going on in that cloud.

Well, the telecom cloud is a fitting analogy for the OSS marketplace -- before you understand the major OSS companies sell, the market looks like one big, but fuzzy OSS cloud.

Chapter 9 clears away the fog so you can make out the details of these companies.  All told, we analyze the businesses of 68 key solution and technology companies in 172 single-spaced pages.

By the way, these profiles are not warmed over press releases.  This is fresh content and analysis based on structured interviews held with key marketing and technology executives at the OSS companies themselves.

And for better quality control, after we wrote up an OSS company’s profile we e-mailed it to the company so they could check it for accuracy.

It’s here in Chapter 9 where you can track the progress of your partners and competitors whoever they are: telecom software companies… systems integrators… consultants… EAI software vendors… and others.  You’ll also find up-to-date OSS company statistics and analyses covering:

• Overall telecom industry revenues

• Past, current, and planned areas of concentration

• Important partnerships with other vendors

• Product details

• Contact information

This chapter will save much legwork for those trying to home in on the right vendors that meet their company’s needs.  The OSS companies profiled are shown in the table of contents.