Billing and business support systems (BSS) have always been the intersection point between the worlds of IT and telecoms. Telcos traditionally sourced their back office solutions mainly from specialized vendors with understanding of the specific demands of an operator’s model, but in recent years, they have been more willing to buy more generic business products and services. That creates challenges for telecoms software suppliers like Amdocs and Netcracker, but also opportunities to extend the business beyond operators to other enterprises and service providers with similar challenges. And as the whole network becomes a series of cloud-based applications, vendors which own a strong virtualized BSS portfolio can find this to be a useful defence against the incursions of suppliers from the…