Billing & Operations Support System (OSS) is important for every service provider.
With respect to Billing, if one cannot bill customers, it directly affects the bottom line. In today’s convergent world it is becoming more and more difficult for the service providers to bill their customers, due to disparate servers, protocols and services. The challenges are numerous, including providing single bills, adapting to different charging models, collecting payment, managing delinquent customers and G/L reporting etc.
OSS takes care of various activities that ensure smooth functioning of the network and related business processes. OSS applications can be broadly categorized into the following three categories:
- Customer focused
- Service management
- Resource / network management
Customer focused applications facilitate business processes like handling orders from customers, managing deals / offerings, managing network definitions for customers, interface for customer's self management.
Service management is focused on modeling hierarchy of various services offered to customers, monitoring its quality of service (QoS) and managing service level agreements (SLA).
Resource / network management deals with managing FCAPS functions for the network (i.e. fault management, configuration management, accounting, performance management and security management).
Skill Sets
HSC has a core team of architects and developers focused on providing OSS and NM solutions to its customers. The team also tracks latest trends in the industry and works with internal teams to developing skillset and reusable components that helps in reducing time to develop the solutions. Skillset in the domain include:
- Standards :
eTOM (ITU-T M.3050), NGOSS, TMF-814, SID, TAM, TMN (ITU-T M.3010), X.733
- Protocols :
SNMP (v1, v2c, v3), CORBA, Netconf, TR 069, CMIL, TL1, SOAP
- COTS Products :
hp OpenView, TeMIP, SMARTS, AdventNet WebNMS, IBM Netcool, NetAct, Cisco Works
- Design technologies :
OOAD, UML, Rational Unified Process
- Programming :
Java technologies, C/C++
- GUI technologies :
Struts 2.0, JSP, Tomcat, .NET, Qt
- Database :
Oracle 10g, MySQL, PostGreSQL