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| 63% of Service Providers See End-to-End, Cross-Domain Service Quality Management as Key OSS Requirement, Survey Shows TTI Team Telecom International announces the results of a survey it conducted at the recent OSS conference and exhibition, TeleManagement World in Nice. Most notably, the survey results reveal that 63% of service providers see end-to-end, cross domain management as their most significant requirement for service management. The survey covered several other areas of OSS, as well as recording cross-reference points such as respondents' plans for IPTV and IMS rollouts, and region. The importance of Fault and Performance systems was shown to be significantly higher than expected. Whereas inventory and provisioning are often assumed to be of chief importance, when asked directly about the dominant applications in respondents' currently existing OSS platform, Fault and Performance management came out on top, at 24% and 21% respectively. When asked separately which NGN OSS application respondents expect to be their top priority by the end of this year, overall the top two results were "Fault and Performance service monitoring", and "service provisioning or installation verification." Interestingly, when isolated by region, "service-level agreements" – which ranked third overall – was rated in second place among European providers, reflecting that providers in this market increasingly see QoS as a key point for differentiation and customer retention. Similarly, those providers with plans for IMS rollouts in the near future showed a higher-than-average emphasis on SLAs. The increasing importance of service impact analysis was reflected in the above responses. Additionally, where 63% of service providers replied that end-to-end service management was of key importance, "linking customers to the service model" came in second at 17%, still more than double any of the remaining options. As for the test and monitoring methods used to handle network quality, CDRs and IPDRs from network elements came out on top at 34% of service providers, with KPIs/KQIs from the control plane rated at 24%. "The results of the survey were surprising at some points, but very logical overall", commented Yaron Eisenstein, Director of Solutions Marketing at TTI Telecom. "Fault and Performance rated surprisingly high compared with other OSS applications, but this a logical outcome of the functional demands which service providers have indicated. We see here a high demand for the kind of Service Impact analysis required to link customers to the service model and uphold SLAs, as well as dependable QoS required for IPTV and IMS, and very high demand for an end-to-end service management solution. All of these require powerful Fault and Performance management systems, and extensive collaboration between the two." When asked about the status of their OSS budget, 60% described their status as "approved" or "in-progress", indicating a high level of certainty and awareness regarding the issues discussed throughout the rest of the survey. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |