Clarity, the market leader in Unified Operational Support Systems (OSS), announced that it will be demonstrating its Integrated Service Operations Centre (iSOC) at Management World 2009, Nice, to complement the launch of the white paper by Stratecast, “Service Operations Centre – An Essential Necessity – An Executive Brief Featuring Clarity”.
The iSOC is now critically important to service providers as the shift from network and technology to customer and market gains momentum across the industry. Without a customer centric view of the network, service providers are effectively left in the dark. They are unable to assess which customers are impacted by what network planned outages or faults and what the commercial ramifications of these might be. They are unable to assess which problems to resolve in order to improve the customer’s experience and address the most important jeopardy situations. They are unable to identify which provisioning activities are over-running, and what agreements are in jeopardy as a result.
The “Service Operations Centre – An Essential Necessity” white paper provides essential insights for those service providers who are investing or considering investing in an iSOC. It describes the new paradigms of customer experience management and customer service assurance, and how an iSOC addresses these. It concludes by describing a practical example of the deployment of a iSOC. Copies of this paper will be available from Clarity’s Stand at Management World, which takes place from 6-8 May 2009 in Nice.
“As our converging industry places greater emphasis on the customer, it comes with a strong need for new tools and new ways of doing business”, commented Karl Whitelock, Senior Consulting Analyst OSS BSS Global Competitive Strategies at Stratecast a division of Frost and Sullivan. “Service- and Customer-oriented operations are essential to any business strategy that places the customer first. It is the next step in the evolutionary chain for managing services involving more than a network connectivity pathway be it mobile or fixed-line broadband.”
Clarity will be demonstrating how its Unified OSS powers the iSOC; outlining how its TMF SID-based information model and functional components can seamlessly map customer experience to service to network behaviour, allowing the service provider to gain insight of customer satisfaction without costly integration of best of breed components. Scenarios shown will include:
• assessing the impact of faults on customers and service-availability SLAs
• prioritisation of problem resolution based on mean-time-to-restore SLA jeopardy information
• monitoring provisioning activities and jeopardy against mean-time-to-provide SLAs
By coupling the SLA to both the customer and the network as part of an out of the box Unified OSS, Clarity is able to monitor and control both the commercial and technical aspects of the customer experience.
“Major service providers are using Clarity’s Unified OSS to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the network and the customer”, commented Tony Kalcina, Chief Product Officer at Clarity. “Clarity’s single information model, stretching from customer to network, and wide functional scope, ranging from planning to billing, allows users of a single system to exploit the wealth of business information which exists in the OSS. Fragmentation of this same information into multiple best-of-breed systems is one of the major issues that the industry is facing, and Clarity’s Unified OSS provides an alternative approach for service providers seeking to harness this rich source of corporate intelligence.”