OSS / BSS Futures Overview R14.5.1 (IG1117)

Virtualization is a trend that is sweeping across the IT and Communications industries and in its wake it is bringing radical change to technical solutions, development methods and operations practices.

Recent publications from ETSI on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have provided early insight as to how Network Functions can be virtualized by adaptions of virtualization techniques for Compute, Storage, and Network developed by the IT industry.

In the initial ETSI work, a decision was made to assume that the existing legacy OSS /BSS was out of scope, and that NFV would be supported by additional functions added to both Networks and OSS / BSS solutions.

However TM Forum studies in the ZOOM Project have shown that the ultimate impact of NFV on OSS/BSS will be significant, and that it will require a transformation of both OSS/BSS solutions, and Service Provider (SP) operational practices.

The reasons for this are that the ultimate goals of NFV are improving agility in introduction of services together with saving operational costs It turns out that current OSS and BSS solutions are a significant barrier to achieving overall service agility, unless they too are re-engineered. This document provides an overview of the necessary changes to OSS/BSS design and implementations that are further developed in the OSS/BSS Futures Framework, reviews some of the related results from Fx14.5 studies and catalyst demonstrations at TM Forum Live! Nice 2014.

This document is aimed at managerial and technical people interested in TM Forum strategic directions of ZOOM and specifically management of virtualization.