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 enterprise market.
Netcracker can perform that role for its Japanese parent NEC. It has long been a jewel in NEC’s crown, and one of the telecom businesses where it can boast global presence, rather than being confined to its home country, as in the RAN. With the migration of the RAN and core to the cloud, NEC is seizing the chance – heavily supported by its flagship 5G customer, Rakuten – to have a last bid for a strong network position (see previous item).
But the support and investment of Rakuten will not be enough on its own to bring success. It is still unclear how operators will take to procuring critical systems from a fellow telco, and the new and untried nature of the Rakuten platform may mean it is adopted mainly by smaller or greenfield operators, or by enterprises, which want a fairly pre-packaged 5G solution.
With the traditional MNOs, Netcracker may be just as valuable an entry point for NEC as Rakuten is (and the new MNO is also using Netcracker technology). Netcracker operates quite independently of its parent, but in the IT-centric world of the 5G network, it seems logical that there will be more cooperation and cross-selling between the divisions. That would allow NEC to move gradually towards offering an end-to-end solution on the same cloud infrastructure, combining the BSS/OSS with critical open RAN elements like a RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC); pls the 5G core co-developed with Rakuten; and the 5G radio/antennas and backhaul/fronthaul.
An example of this kind of thinking was seen in a trial that NEC and Netcracker led in Malaysia over the past three years. Working with three IT majors – Red Hat, Juniper and Dell EMC – they trialled an end-to-end multivendor set of virtualized network node functions, which could be mixed and matched, Lego-style, to support SDN-controlled communication services for operators or enterprises. The aim was to develop a reference platform which could cut time to market to introduce new services by up to 70%, compared to the current timescale of 6-12 months.
The platform combined Netcracker’s hybrid operations management and business enablement applications with NEC/Netcracker’s virtualization deployment operations center and multilayer SDN controller. Red Hat contributed its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution; Juniper its NFV networking services platform to integrate physical and virtual elements; and Dell EMC its PowerEdge NFV platform.
“As the industry moves quickly towards 5G technology, getting the management and orchestration environment right is critical to enable new IoT use cases requiring dynamic network slicing,” said Aloke Tusnial, CTO of SDN/NFV at Netcracker, at the time.
More recently, Netcracker’s own offering has been revamped, bringing together upgraded BSS/OSS and customer engagement products under the Netcracker 2020 banner. The whole portfolio is built around microservices and offered as-a-service, and operators can develop their own enhancements through a low code platform.
Netcracker 2020, whose commercial availability has been delayed by the pandemic crisis, also boasts an expanded security framework and continuous short releases using DevOps processes.
Another key feature is an AI-driven system to combine Netcracker and third party functions on a context-aware basis to support better interaction with customers. Personalized offerings can be dynamically created and delivered with enhanced user experiences. The system allows complex relationships with many partners to be managed through processes such as automated on-boarding and simplified lifecycle management.
CTO Bob Titus said: “This includes support for new business models, hyper-automation, cloud adoption and the use of open source, outcome-based delivery models and, perhaps most importantly, an exceptional digital-first customer experience.”
Netcracker says 15 operators and enterprises, including some new customers, have signed up for its new suite. They include Vodafone, Rakuten Mobile, Viasat, Telekom Austria and Swisscom, plus Bechtle, the largest IT system house in Germany.