Louise WasiLeWski, Harvey stotLand
SponSor
Louise Wasilewski is senior manager, Cable
Business Solutions, for Capgemini. Harvey
Stotland is VP Cable Industry Solutions, for
Capgemini.
network. Thinking about the different devices within
the home gives us an opportunity to offer tiered services and give customers some control over their own
service experience.
Louise Wasilewski
senior Manager, Cable
Business solutions
Capgemini
Harvey stotland
vP Cable industry
solutions
Capgemini
are the cable industry’s it and oss challenges
unique?
HS: There is some uniqueness to the cable industry’s
OSS requirements—for example, DOCSIS modem
provisioning—but the bottom line is that they are not
unique.
In every sub-segment of the larger service provider
industry, there are legacy systems across the fulfillment assurance and holes in FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security). As each
of these companies adds and bundles new products,
they have mostly added point solutions. That makes it
very difficult to get a cohesive view of inventory and
services to do end-to-end, flow-through provisioning
and service assurance.
Every department is talking about OSS transformation to reduce silos and improve costs. The way
that they’re doing that is automation: shifting from a
carbon-based, people-heavy model to a much more
of a silicon-based, IT-centric model, through service-oriented architectures and the introduction of business process orchestration.
do you expect more network convergence?
HS: There is an advantage to consumers’ having voice,
video and data services accessible to them at any of
their end points. The question is, how can MSOs take
advantage of that?
Take fixed/mobile convergence—for example,
using femtocells to complement a wireless portfolio
or WiMAX to make video available both over wireless
and fixed devices. Do MSOs need their own network,
or can they form partnerships? How would that
impact the OSS they need in-house vs. the OSS that
they borrow from a partner? How much of the SLA
are they going to be responsible for?
What does it take to have an effective cable it
department?
LW: A successful IT group will be one that understands the business of cable and how to make that
business function more smoothly, rather than necessarily choosing the simplest solution.
Shifting processes to packages makes upgrades
and integrations easier in the future, and that lowers
costs, reduces errors and increases vendor independence. But there are many instances that justify a
degree of customization to make your business work
better. That is the balance between going off the shelf
for simplicity and customization for maximum business efficiency.
Another balance is where to locate business functions and their IT systems. It may be very local when
customer intimacy is important. It may be in a low-cost region of the United States, for example, for payment processing. Or it may be offshore.
HS: The opening last summer of a cable track to
the TM Forum’s standards work shows to me that the
cable industry is taking a very structured approach to
thinking about IT challenges. It’s the IT department
that really has the opportunity to move to standardized process, application and data models so the business can then start differentiating on top of that.
What about at the residential end of the network?
LW: There’s no denying that the home environment
is becoming more complicated. A key opportunity is
to invest in automated diagnostic tools that can see
beyond the modem or the router and into the home
What do Msos need to be doing to better serve
businesses?
LW: Much of the conversation around business
services is really focused in the area of service level
agreements. However, the bigger IT challenge is going
from a self-contained, my-system-is-an-island philosophy to a worldview that expects third parties to
interact with that environment.
That means opening some parts of IT to third parties, be they generic aggregators or other MSOs who
are reselling your services. Similarly, a large proportion of small and medium businesses purchase service
through value-added resellers. These VARs need
timely access to information and the ability to place
and track service orders easily. ■
Supplement to Communications Technology 17
