Telecommunications

Microsoft's Telecommunication Reference Architectures

Today communications are characterized by the ever-growing demand for anytime, anywhere, and always on connections enabling real-time dynamic interaction between people, services, devices and machines. This unprecedented demand for ‘ More ’ -- more connections, more content & services, more devices and more personalization continues to accelerate the pace of change in the industry while the rise of social media increasingly plays a role in customer loyalty.

In combination , the scale of these trends and the velocity with which they occur have significant implications for CSP’s. CSP’s face the challenge of developing, launching, supporting and monetizing new services, supporting exponential growth requirements and the need for rising investments, while at the same time continuing to delight customers by providing personalized services and experiences.

The pace of change and exponential growth require a new paradigm. A paradigm which leverages agile new technologies, systems and services which can replace or augment legacy capabilities and enable innovative new business models that unlock the promise of the digital economy.

From superior customer interactions and compelling digital experiences to personalized offerings, targeted campaigns, revealing analytics, and agile platforms Microsoft and its Partners provide the solutions needed to:

Envision - collaborate to envision the future and drive innovation
Accelerate – create solutions to accelerate business processes
Transform – enhance agility to transform and compete

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Business Analytics Accelerator
Multi-Cloud Service Delivery & E2E Mgmt

Companies in the telecommunications industry have complex internal operations, with the need to track millions of customers and billions of calls and transactions. They are also dealing with an extremely competitive, rapidly evolving external environment. Effective business intelligence (BI) solutions are critical to their future success.

The Microsoft Business Analytics Accelerator for Telecommunications (Telco BAA) provides a framework that can be readily reused and extended to fast-track the design, development, and deployment of a business analytics solution for the telecommunications industry. The Telco BAA focuses on a few core scenarios and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to speed the time to implementation for telecommunications operator. However, the solution can be easily grown to support countless other scenarios.

The data model included in the Telco BAA implements TM Forum Frameworx Information Framework (SID) Aggregate Business Entities (ABE) associated with the following analytical areas:

Customer Profitability Data Mart

Customer Profitability / Margin

Customer Segmentation Data Mart

Demographic Segmentation

Campaign Response Segmentation

Customer Risk Segmentation

Customer Care Segmentation

Product and Market Revenue Segmentation

Customer Invoice Value Segmentation

Customer Experience Data Mart

Customer Care Performance

Demographics

Campaign Response

Product and Market Revenue

Customer Invoice Value (Churn Prediction)

Network Performance

Aggregated Revenues

Customer Risk

Learn more: Business Analytics Accelerator for Telecommunications
Business and consumer services delivered in today’s digital economy are increasingly dependent upon resources distributed across a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders. Content Owners, Communications Service Providers (CSPs), Multiple System Operators (MSOs), Cloud Providers, Business and Consumer Users and of course Developers are all interdependent. As evident in Figure 1, the processes of creating content / services, service delivery and of managing the overall experience end-to-end in this multi-service provider / multi-cloud environment has become challenging.

Service Providers today are dealing with four major trends:

Multiple devices from a variety of manufacturers.

Complex developer ecosystems

Expediential Growth of Service APIs

Reality of Multi-Cloud Service Delivery

To address these issues the TM Forum developed the Software Enabled Services (SES)1 Management Solution. It defines the concept of an SES Service that exposes both a Functional Interface as well as an explicit interface for the management of a service or a service composition.

The SES Management Solution is not particularly concerned with what the service does via the Functional Interface but does expand upon the manageability aspects especially in these two areas:

The Simple Management Interface2 (SMI) defines a design pattern for an API that reveals how to manage any given service from a Provisioning, Assurance and Usage/Charging perspective.

The Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) defines ITILv3 2011 aligned best practices and requirements for establishing a role based software/services factory and a Lifecycle Management Meta Data model.

There are two principal differences with cloud computing that make more difficult the problem of managing resources associated with cloud services. One difference is the virtualization at the elastic compute and elastic network layers as well as the sheer scale of that virtualization. The other difference is that multiple clouds and multiple enterprise domains are increasingly involved in the delivery of cloud services further complicating resource management.

The term “SDF” and “SES” will be used interchangeably in this paper. Early TM Forum documents used the term “SDF” or Service Delivery Framework and later TM Forum documents use the newer “SES” term. When a drawing is pulled from a TM Forum document the term SDF or SES may appear depending upon the date of those docs. No attempt is made to refactor the terminology to the newer term.

Simple Management Interface was the term adopted with the launch of the TM Forum Digital Services Initiative in December 2012. The term had progressed from “Simple Management Interface” to “SES Management Interface”. “Simple Management Interface” will be term used going forward.

Learn more: Multi-Cloud Service Delivery & End-to-End Management