How to act with total Clarity

Details: Michael Schwartz; Category: Service Management; 21 June 2007; 10011 views

Modern telcos are faced with operational challenges: convergence, consolidation lower voice revenues and pressure for quick launch are some that come to mind. Clarity, founded 14 years ago, is one company with solutions to offer - and recent experience in Sri Lanka ...

In many parts of the world, the telecommunications industry is undergoing some fundamental changes: convergence of voice, data and video; operator and vendor consolidation; declining voice revenues; and pressure to launch new services quickly and generate new revenue streams.

In direct connection with these changes, telcos are faced with operational challenges, including restricted IT budgets, evolving Next Generation Network (NGN) technologies overtaking legacy systems, and increasing demands from customers for improved service quality.

One company addressing these challenges is Clarity. Established in 1993, Clarity is an Operational Support System (OSS) business process automation company providing a pre-integrated product and database that streamlines the 17 eTOM elements of OSS into a single suite. Clarity's global headquarters is in Sydney, Australia, with offices in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

Clarity is in the business of providing its Next Generation OSS product to telecommunication service providers, allowing them to define their new competitive services; fulfil, activate and provision these services on customer request and then to assure and manage the ongoing quality and performance of these services ensuring conformance to service level agreements.

Clarity's Next Generation OSS is a fulfilment and assurance application set that is based on a single design philosophy, platform, architecture, and data schema. Clarity supports end-to-end business processes, and aims to reduce implementation and maintenance costs, and to reduce time-to-market for new services.

Today, Clarity simplifies network support for over 90 million subscribers worldwide, with a diverse customer base ranging from large Tier-1 incumbents to new market entrants. Reflecting the challenges already listed, it supports a broad spectrum of technologies including legacy, IP and Next Generation Networks. Some of Clarity's customers include AAPT in Australia, Reliance in India, Sri Lanka Telecom, PT Telkom and PLDT.

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), to take an example from the developing world, provides 87% of Sri Lanka's fixed network and provides a wide range of services - from ADSL to satellite up-link and maritime transmission - to a customer base of 1.2 million. In Clarity's words, SLT deployed the Clarity suite for order management and provisioning, inventory management, number management and assignment, trouble-ticketing and network engineering.

Since deployment of the Clarity suite, average order-to-provisioning times are claimed to have reduced from 14 days to two days. In addition, fault clearance has risen to 84% across the country and revenue leakages of approximately US$6 million per month have been identified. Most significantly for SLT is that they were able to achieve an ROI on this investment within 3 months of deployment.

Clarity's Next Generation OSS is billed as giving the client a single view of the network, services and customer information which will enable an OSS transformation in complex telco services by bridging the network and the customer layer. It will also reduce complexity and enable more efficient maintenance and upgrades, thereby lowering implementation and total ownership costs.

Many of Clarity's projects result in the client deploying a single strategic OSS platform used for the provisioning and assurance of all their network and service needs, generally based upon a hybrid of fixed and mobile as well as legacy and NGN technologies.

Reliance Communications, in India, has over 30 million subscribers of voice, data and IP services, delivered over 80,000 km of optical fibre and providing wireless coverage through over 15,000 BTSs - all managed from a single, national NOC. Clarity's solutions for inventory management, provisioning and alarm, and performance management were deployed. These helped Reliance launch its NGN within one year, launch new products and new network technologies within 30 days, automate industry 'best practice' processes, achieve predictability in service provisioning times, and be able to detect, analyse and correlate a fibre cut anywhere in India within four minutes. Perhaps, most significantly, the system provided management visibility of over US$5 billion of deployed network infrastructure.

Client Solutions Clarity supports:

Throughout Europe and the CIS, telecommunications operators are seeking to consolidate disparate OSS infrastructures to offer superior customer service, reduce costs and differentiate their commercial propositions through speed of response and service quality management.

Clarity's current expansion into developing European markets is summarised by Bill Tickner, VP Europe & CIS. Tickner says: "These complex and long term transformation programmes require an experienced Tier 1 OSS vendor capable of supporting automation across convergent fulfilment and assurance processes to realise operators' goals."

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