 Ceon Product Control Center
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) all over the world are facing the dual challenge of slowing demand in their core legacy businesses and accelerating competition from new entrants and more innovative competitors. Between fixed-line, wireless, cable, satellite and ISP operators, end subscribers have plenty of provider choices available to them. The only option available to service providers to retain and expand their customer base is to differentiate themselves by introducing new offerings – ones that are built from a vast selection of their underlying components, customized and personalized easily, introduced to market quickly, retired sooner, and more importantly, are lifestyle linked. However, this clear business mandate cannot be met with the current product development and product management processes being used at most integrated operators.
Product and marketing managers within service providers have relied primarily on paper-based and highly manual processes to support the definition and roll-out of new offerings. Additionally, the processes to handle product changes are incomplete and untimely, and figuring out the implications of product changes is a ‘best effort’ task. These time-consuming (4-6 months or longer), error-prone and labor intensive processes will no longer work in the new world of exploding marketplace offers that are a mix-and-match of a variety of base services, content and merchandize.
This white paper briefly reviews the telecommunications industry trends and the resulting challenges that are driving the need for the adoption a new class of operations support systems called Next-Generation Product Lifecycle Management solutions (NGPLM). These software systems are targeted at product and marketing managers as the primary application users, and these systems will help service providers speed-up and simplify new product introduction and product change management.
This white paper focuses primarily on providing an introduction and a high-level overview of this new class of OSS by the way of reviewing the Ceon Product Control Center (PCC) software application. Ceon PCC is a purpose-built software system focused on enabling service providers’ product and marketing personnel to collaboratively construct, manage and deploy a catalog of complex product offerings. PCC automatically searches and generates valid product possibilities from user-defined templates. PCC also manages the entire lifecycle of offerings, including managing the implications of changes in constituent components. Ceon PCC exposes created definitions to external B/OSS systems via standards-based interfaces. |
