Either Telus CTO, Ibrahim Gedeon, is an avid reader of my blogs or he is a brilliant man in his own right (probably the latter). At this week’s B/OSS Billing and OSS Conference being held in Washington, DC he said that telecom network operators needed to be more open to partnerships and innovation and let go of the notion that they have to deliver every part of a service or application themselves.
He was also critical of IP Multi-Media Subsystems (IMS) stating it as “a waste of seven years” by a wireless industry that was trying to bring its voice service into the IP realm. Cloud services also received some ‘treatment’ as Gedeon questioned whether anyone really knew what they were!
He pushed the point that billing and other support systems have to do more to enable communications service providers to partner and profit in the new world of applications and prevent companies, such as Apple & Google, from stealing their thunder and their profits.
Here is a man that doesn’t mince his words, “the billing and OSS systems have to rally around,” he said. This must have been music to the ears of attendees but may have left them wondering just how they can convince their C-levels to invest more in business systems, like billing, in the hope that they can generate extra revenues in their own right. The ‘build it and they will come’ rule appears to apply only to infrastructure rollout. BSS appears to have become the poor relative, but for how long?